I Fail Logistics Forever
I had things all nicely planned out, see? On Friday night, I’d post the rest of the pics from Bercy, along with witty captions and biting comments about French people’s frenchness and all the usual stuff, perhaps go into a rant along the way, who knows. And I’d have pics from Thursday as well, where the university was again blocked. Etc. Etc. Etc. And then yesterday (Saturday) morning I’d hop on the train to London, get there, visit my friend in Oxford, and have a lovely time in England, which I’d post about on Monday. Lovely plan, no?
Then on Friday evening, I went to the Gar du Nord jsut to see if I could get my train tickets ahead of time, and started running into serious complications, mostly stemming from my having missed a bit of fine print buried in the middle of the confirmation email and allegedly also featured somewhere on Eurostar’s website (I link to this so that you too can, if you so desire, attempt to book tickets there. It’s a fun way to pass an afternoon, and is more or less financially risk-free; the system usually derails far, far before you get to the payment-information bit, and even after you’ve gone through that, it’s liable to tell you that for some reason or other it can’t complete the transaction, you have to start over, dreadfully sorry, have a nice day, so long, and thanks for all the fish). At any rate, Friday was not spent posting, but was spent frantically attempting to figure out the details of how exactly I could obtain my tickets, and I left my dorm room Saturday morning mostly expecting that I’d have to come right on back. I did get the tickets in the end, and ended up running full-tilt down the escalators for the train and only got on about three minutes before it started moving.
I compounded the logistical errors once I was safely checked into my hotel room. Given that it’s about 1.5-2 hours by bus form London to Oxford, and that checkout for the hotel is at 12:00 pm, and my tickets for Paris departs at 8:30 pm or thereabouts, and that I brought a relatively large suitcase (a bit unnecessarily, really, since I actually can stuff everything I brought into my backpack), the obvious course of action would have been to spend Saturday explroing London and going to the various museums and things people had recommended, and then to check out on Sunday morning, head down to Oxford, hang out there, and come back to London in time to catch the train. Yeah. Instead I headed directly over to Oxford, had a lovely time, came back last night, and am now going to have to check out in the next 45 minutes, and will end up wandering about London with a big duffel bag. In a mild rain, to boot. Though on the upside, that mild rain has led to a very nice ambient temperature, and it does seem a lovely city to wander about.
At any rate, um… I suppose the point of the above paragraphs is that… well, there’s really no point, but I had to write something and that’s what’s on my mind. Hey, if anything, it’s proof that I’m an equal-opportunity complainer; it’s not just French people’s inability to plan things well that irritates me, it’s my own as well. Aren’t I wonderfully egalitarian?
And now the rest of the pics from Bercy, mostly from the Musée des Arts Forains, without captions or such because that would take too much time. Yes, all the video is of me grinning like an idiot on merry-go-rounds. We rode three in all. It was entertaining. It also leads me to ponder why “grinning like an idiot” is such an idiomatic expression. I mean, I’ve come across plenty of idiots who aren’t particularly cheery, you know? I guess it’s the inverse of the ignorance-is-bliss idea. Anyway: pictures!
Fun game. I placed about 3rd in the first round even though I joined in late and the guy next to me (who got first) had been using both our controller thingies on his little racing waiter. Clearly I have useful skills).
Started drizzling when I went into the metro. By the time I got out, there were crowds of people trying to get down the station-entrance stairs, the bottom of which was a big puddle, and there was hail. Little hail, but hail nonetheless.
