catching up

Sometimes I imagine jetlag as your soul catching up to you.

I’m going to wax philosophical here, in case you haven’t noticed. . .
The human body was never meant to travel at close to the speed of sound. The longer you stay in a place, the more your soul becomes anchored to it. When you move, it grudgingly follows. When you move quickly, well, that takes awhile; and the further you go the longer it takes to catch up to you. They say it takes one day to catch up for every hour of jet lag you have, but you can’t break it down mathematically like that. The more you throw yourself into whatever you’re doing the faster the catch up happens. If you come back to a routine of 9 to 5 I imagine a flight from western Europe might take you 6 days to get over. I am almost over my jet lag after being back for 2 days, but I know my soul hasn’t caught up to me yet because I don’t feel like I’m here. I don’t quite feel like I’m in France either. I’d say it’s somewhere over the atlantic, approaching the southern tip of Greenland. . .

Since I’m not really in either place at the moment, it’s hard to recall all that happened since I last wrote, but I’ll try to summarize the highlights. . . Kuider had to leave us, as he became more of a liability than anything else with his shoulder, which sucked because he is a cool guy. He is going to get surgery to try to mitigate the problem a bit, hopefully it helps. He visited us once briefly and then it was back to Grenoble. In between weekends, which are the true highlights I must say, our staff struggled through the hardest schoolgroup any of us have ever had to deal with. Stuck up kids from the town of Gstaadt, Switzerland. We had a 14 year old girl who wore a 1800 swiss franc duck down coat with fur on the hood – on a canoe trip. She had a 2000 swiss franc Gucci bag with her, and she receives regular skin exfoliations and botox injections. I wish a word of this was exaggeration. She was the daughter of a Kazakh oil baron. She screamed when we made her pick up a stack of dirty plates, something that is part of camp. . . The kids would regularly speak over us and ignore us while we were talking. In their lives everything is handed to them on a silver platter, and so they are used to adults submitting to their wishes. . . I think they had a rough week too. The school had a trip to Avignon planned, and a couple of us were going to hitch a ride in and go our own way (it was our day off), but there were no seats left on the bus. Chloe had to get in to take care of some university stuff, so the morning of she approached me and asked if I had my license. . . I suppose she forgot our motorbike trip. She managed to talk Violette, her friend who works as house staff, into letting us borrow her car. A glorious little Fiat Punto. We endearingly referred to it as the Fiat Puto. This thing was a rollerskate. No power steering, clicks when you shift it. Amazing little machine, corners like a bastard. So Ward, Chloe, Ruthie, our Scottish friend and myself crammed into the Fix It Again Tony and booted it to Avignon. By the time we got there I wanted my own Fiat. Chloe took us around the city, we checked out the Palais de Pape (pope’s palace) When there was a division in the papacy much of the church was ruled from Avignon, and the castle they built the pope is massive. Of course we checked out the Pont D’Avignon also, an absurd little number of a bridge that people come the world over to see – it only goes halfway across the Rhone. Charming. Actually it is kinda cool, but the French like to make fun of it, for good reason. I don’t think I was the only one to appreciate the irony of driving for free across a bridge to get to the other side of a river so you could go pay to walk on a bridge that didn’t quite make it. Still, it’s beautiful in its own way. Avignon was hot as blazes, and after enjoying some beers while Chloe took care of school stuff, we walked up the narrow streets and ignored the school children which we passed on the way. Something none of us would ever have pictured ourselves doing, but we did it. . . these kids were brutal. It was nice to feel a pint of beer in your legs, wandering the streets of france, just watching people, smelling bakeries, butcher shops and motorcycles. We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. After a wander back to the Punto after ferrying back across the Rhone in a free boat, we headed home. The highlight was the insane drive down the gorge road. Record time I think. We pulled into the Quetzal, our favourite watering hole to spend the 9 euros the British School of Paris had so kindly given us each as a tip, and we all enjoyed a pizza and beer in the light of the setting sun. A couple of days later it was time for me to think about leaving, something I never like doing but seem to do a lot. We were to expect another school the next day, so I felt bad for whoever it was I was going to convince to drink with me that night, but alas – fortune smiled. Around 5:00 the school called and we found out they had screwed up the schedule and weren’t coming till the next day. We had beers open within 10 minutes. In an hour we’d gone into town to pick up more beer and wine. In an hour and a half we’d eaten a huge dinner and toasted to leaving, to each other, to the lack of asshole kids, and we were smiling. In 2 hours or so a game of backyard cricket had broken out, which after about 2 moved to the volleyball court. After some beach volleyball we set off into the night to seek our fortune at the Quetzal. After some drinks there it was time to head to the local discotheque: the Cubanito. We were pretty excited for the bowling alley/discotheque combo. Some people had to turn back out of sheer inebriation, but those of us who pressed on were NOT duly rewarded for it. We took a cab for the first time (the cubanito was kinda far). Our dreams came crashing to a discriminatory halt at the door. The guy at the door just looked at our little posse, and looking straight ahead said “Desole, c’est ne pas possible”. We waited patiently, thinking it was too full to go in at the minute. .. after he waved in the people behind us, who were dressed remarkably like us, we figured it out slowly. We were not French, so no club for us. Asshole. Chloe arrived and even she couldn’t tease a good reason out of him, but there was no doubt in our minds what it was. It was infuriating. In a country where my skin is a different colour, or people are less socially aware, I would expect this, but in France, a country as diverse as Canada, I was shocked. We had to open our mouths before he made his decision. I guess he didn’t know there were about 6 or 7 different passports between us, or even if he did, he didn’t care. What a frustrating ending. We had to laugh though, because you woulnd’t think a Bowling alley/Discotheque in the middle of Buttfuck France would have the kind of business where they could just afford to turn people away like that, but they did! Also my visit to France wouldn’t be complete if I still looked at the whole country through rose coloured glasses, so this had to happen. Also made it easier to get on the train to Switzerland, because all I could think about was what an outrage that would cause back in Canada. . . In closing, France, I have no hard feelings. We have assholes here too, and from what I heard about you I thought you’d have had a lot more than I’ve seen in my last couple of visits to you. You’ve been nothing but kind to me, and you’ve made me think not too whimsically about moving to you. Thanks for all your hospitality, I’ll be back. Vive La France. Also, if you could release my soul, that would be great, since I’m wandering around in a bit of a hollow state right now, and I need that back.

Tomorrow it’s up to Minden for a Whitewater Rescue Technician course, which overlaps neatly with Tripper training, the start of what is likely to be an epic summer. You get that Deb? Epic! I’m coming up. . .