‘You'll Have a Gay Ol’ Time...’

It’s taking me a bit longer to blog about my Paris experience than I thought it would and, in the meantime, I don’t want to miss out on referencing things that are happening in the here and now. To that end, I’m going to set aside Paris for just a moment, and tell you about the start of my weekend…

But first, a bit of set-up: my sleeping habits are totally out of whack, and have been for the duration of my time in London (even before I moved in to Club Lithuanian Frat Guys—who, by the way, I’m more convinced than ever might actually work for the bratva because none of them ever seem go to work of any kind!). Most nights, I am unable to fall asleep before about 2:00 AM.

What’s worse, is that for the last two weeks in a row, I have not been able to fall asleep on Wednesday nights at all! The first time this happened, I assumed it was because of the pounding music coming from Olik’s room, and that I was wound-up following a midnight confrontation with him about it. (I hate conflict, you see, and it makes me feel incredible anxious before/during /after.) But then, again this week, this whole lack-of-sleep on Wednesday night happened, and I’m not sure why.

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(Mostly) Unrelated Segue

I’m sorry, I need to interrupt the flow of this entry for a moment. I just went downstairs to check on my laundry while in the midst of composing this entry, and ran into Olik, who is completely pissed (in the British, drunken sense).

He cornered me in the hallway, put his arm around me—which, by the way, is the size of a small tree trunk—and asked if I was bothered by the music he’s blaring at this moment. Not wanting to get into it with him again, I said that it was fine because I wasn’t doing homework, but that if I started later I might ask him to turn it down. 

At that point he nodded his head and smiled and said, ‘You’re a good person—I like you. You’re like family now.’ 

Good Lord, does this mean that I’m now part of the bratva, too? I swear, if anyone tries to kiss me on the cheek while I’m staying here, I will be getting right-the-fuck-out!

End Segue

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Back to the Wednesday sleeplessness issue, the reason this is problematic is that my school week begins early on Thursday morning, meaning that said-lack-of-sleep makes me feel like I’m in a fog for the next two days’ worth of classes (because, as most people know, the second day is almost worst than the first). Then, by the time Friday afternoon rolls around—and I’m finished with my classes for the week—I’m exhausted, jumpy, and feeling overall weird.

So, now that you have this understanding of my mental-, emotional-, and physical-states in mind, we can proceed to Friday (24 February)…

When I got home on Friday afternoon (circa 2:00 PM), my upstairs flatmates were already going full-force with their music and drinking. Mind you, all I wanted to do was sleep for a bit. But, that wasn’t going to happen—even after asking them to turn it down, they didn’t. This just added to my agitation. 

In short, my only option was to get out of the flat before I put my fists through a wall. That’s when I ultimately decided to accept my friend TvH’s offer to go out with him and his friends to Soho that night.

A facefull of Purple Steel before goin' out...

Fast-forward to 10:30 PM, and I was making my way from the Tottenham Court Road tube stop toward The Edge. Now, although The Edge consists of multiple stories, we never left the ground floor. This is mostly for three reasons: 

(1) TvH, L. (his boyfriend), and I were waiting for the rest of the group to show up;

(2) the bar—complete with hot, shirtless bartenders—was within easy reach; and,

(3) there were hot go-go boys dancing on the stage (which is tucked back behind the disco ball seen in the upper-right of the photo below).

The Edge, ground floor. (NB: This is not my photo!)

Owing to some stereotypical gay drama, the last two members of our group didn’t arrive until around 1:30 AM. But that was okay, because the music was good (I was shocked by how much ‘new’ music I actually recognized), and the remix the DJ played of Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’ was amazaballs!

Eventually, four hours after arriving, the group decided that it was time to check out someplace else. So, en masse, we made our way into the gaybourhood streets. After a stumbling stroll, we finally arrived at G-A-Y Late.

Now, unfortunately, after standing in line for about 15 minutes, the bouncer allowed four of us to enter but arbitrarily blocked the fifth, saying he was too drunk. Mind you, we were all at the same level of sobriety—in fairness, we should all have been blocked.

Well, not to be thwarted, we once again staggered into the streets (pausing briefly at one of those port-a-urinals—using that was a bizarre experience to be sure, but better than being caught on CCTV doing something you shouldn’t, I guess!)

NB: This is not my photo, nor is it the one I used. Just for the record.

Next stop: Ku Bar. My recollection of Ku Bar basically consists of another hot, shirtless bartender with pecs like boulders and nipples like diamonds, a bit of dancing—which, I’m sure to the non-drunkards in the room looked something along the lines of the Elaine Benes dance—and a marine layer of that artificial club-fog that smells like a cross between artificial sweetener, armpits, and ball-sweat. But, there must have been a bit more to it than just those three things, because I also have a distinct recollection of feeling like it was reminiscent of my once-favorite stomping ground, Velvet Nation.

Finally, at around 3:30 AM, it was time to head home…

Except, I was a bit turned around, as were TvH and L. As an acquaintance of mine of Facebook just wrote about his similar experience this weekend, ‘after 3 hours of traveling back and forth like a homecoming hooker’s walk of shame, we said fuck it and tried to hail a cab. Tried. None of those bitches would pick us up.’ That pretty much sums up our attempt at leaving.

 

Eventually, after walking in circles—Piccadilly Circus, to be exact—for a bit, we found a bus that would take us to Canning Town station, from whence we could all catch trains to our respective flats. (Of course, this decision also necessitated that we wait until 5:30 AM for the trains to start running again…with all of us dressed for going out, and not necessarily dressed for warmth.)

But, I made it home safely (albeit not until after sunrise), and without being part of a mugging scenario this time. YAY!

Paris or Bust...By Bus!

I suppose I should start blogging about my Paris experience while it’s fresh on my mind. The problem is, there’s just so much to say that I don’t know where to begin. So, I think I’m just going to break it up day-by-day and in chunks, and take it from there…

18 February 2012:

Saturday morning started at O’Dark Early as my old friend and coworker Teresa used to say. The bus that was to take me from London to Paris was scheduled to depart Victoria Coach Station at 8:00 AM, but I was supposed to be there by 7:00 AM. Under normal circumstances, it would only take me about 50 minutes to get to Victoria Coach Station from where I'm living—except, the city’s transportation authority decided to shut down a portion of the District Line between my flat and the station. Fortunately I found out the day before, and was able to plan an alternate route by bus.

Yes, the bus. 

Now, almost everyone in my immediate circle knows how much I detest the bus, and they also know that I will usually take whatever out-of-the-way routes are possible to avoid taking the slowest, most irritating form of transportation (that was surely developed by the Marquis de Sade) ever concocted! Nonetheless, at such an early hour, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and climbed aboard a friggin’ bus. 

Over an hour later, I was finally at the station and, finally, at about 8:10 AM, we set off for Paris!

From Victoria Coach station, we crossed over to the ‘southside’ of London and down through Lewisham. (In fact, we passed near Blackheath, and I even saw the side-road where KG&MM lived when Nic and I stayed with them back in 2008!) From there we headed toward Kent, passing within 6km of the beautiful Leeds Castle, and then on to Dover (though, sadly, I was not able to see the famous cliffs).

Our Approximate Route Across England

At Dover, we approached the entrance to the chunnel (a.k.a.the channel tunnel), where we encountered the following sign, leading to generalized excitement amongst the passengers:

'Lies, Damned Lies And Statistics!' ~ Benjamin Disraeli

However, said-sign was misleading: first we had to go through the border crossing process (which, in hindsight, took far less time that the nightmarish crossing back—but that’s a post for later). We sat in front of this sign for about 20 minutes, at which point two agents from the UK Home Office finally boarded the bus. We were all told to give them our passports, which they collected and disappeared with for another 20 minutes or so. Eventually, the agents returned and gave our passports back to us with the appropriate stamps in-place.

Cleared, the bus was allowed to move toward the chunnel. Now, I don’t really know what I expected the channel tunnel to be like, but it was nothing like what I encountered. I suppose I had a vague assumption that it would kind of be like a regular tunnel—you know, like the kind that cuts through a mountain, or the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel or something—and the bus would just drive through.

I was wrong.

The area was like some kind of bizarre mining operation—or, perhaps a better example, like the Fright Zone from the ‘She-Ra’ cartoon!

Inspiration for the channel tunnel?

There were tracks as far as the eye could see, and these massive train cars—tall enough to hold either two rows of cars stacked on top of each other, or conversely a single row of double-decker buses. 

I watched with a profound sense of wonder as our bus actually maneuvered its way into one of the giant cars, and we settled in for the crossing.

Once we were loaded up and en route, we were free to move about the train. Of course, there wasn’t much to see—the windows looked out onto a dark tunnel, no different from a typical subway—and the only places to go were the bathrooms at either end of the massive train. Nonetheless, I got out and walked around for the sheer fact of the experience.

Now, some things worth noting about the undersea journey between England and France:

1. Yes, your ears do pop a bit.
2. To pass between the massive cars, you have to press this scary looking red button for two seconds which, I guess, equalizes the pressure between the cars long enough for you to cross between them.
3. There are these lovely placards everywhere that tell you what to do in case of an emergency, and they are accompanied by a lovely graphic (drawn in a sedate, calming blue) of the train pausing at a special ‘emergency access tunnel’ between train lines, and letting off a bunch of happy, walking passengers in an orderly fashion. Upon seeing this image, I couldn't help laughing because I remembered the airplane scene in Fight Club and pictured the chaos that would ensue should there be an actual emergency—you know, like 250 feet-worth of water crashing down on top of us!

Fortunately, there were no emergencies, and we emerged on the other side successfully and, at last, I caught my first sign of the European continent!

Calais, France, the town in which we (basically) emerged, looked to be a charming place from what little I could see of it from afar. And there were old steeples absolutely everywhere! The effect was quite pretty.

However, I must confess something here, as it was around the time of our emerging from the channel tunnel when I had this realization: 

France smells, Now, I know that’s a positively horrid thing of me to say, and I’m sure a great many people worldwide would say the same about the US. But, whereas (for instance) Ireland was possessed by a pleasingly sweet scent, which danced in the air and just slightly graced one’s nosehairs every now and again, France was filled with a heady, somewhat overpowering perfume-like smell. You know the kind I mean—that stuff the older ladies in Atlantic City use. And there was no dancing in the air or graceful tickling with this stuff—it hit you in the face like a can-can dancer’s…well, I digress…

But enough about unpleasant odors...

Within about twenty minutes, we had started the longest part of our journey—about three hours through Northern France’s countryside. I wish I could regale you with tales of its beauty, but—owing to the time of year, and rainy weather—there wasn’t much to see. 

Honestly, it kind of reminded me a bit of a cross between Montross, Virginia, and Galway, Ireland. And many of the houses were somewhat reminiscent of the Dickens Village houses you see at Christmastime: tall and skinny, with angular roofs. Immediately, the song ‘Little Town’ from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast came to mind:

 

 

In fact, after watching the above video in setting up this entry, I realize just how accurate my initial recollection and comparison of the architecture was.

Aside from these occasional ‘provincial’ towns, the only other things worth noting from this portion of the journey are a preponderance of high-speed trains (why, oh why, don’t we have these in the US yet?), and a breathtaking glimpse I had about 40km from Paris of two people in full, navy-blue horseback riding kit galloping down a steep hill atop their beautiful horses!

Eventually, the bus reached our penultimate stop: Charles de Gaulle Airport. Now, I didn’t get off at this stop, but I kind of which I had. It was a huge facility, and designed in such a way that it was like being in a giant honeycomb—or maybe an ant’s hive is a better comparison. The roadways were all massive, looping and corkscrewing! And neither time I was there—either on the way in to Paris, or on the way back to London—did the drop-off and pick-up area seem clogged, no doubt owing to this ingenious layout! It really was stunning! (Of course, much like the traffic circles in London, I’m sure this is an engineering marvel that simply wouldn’t work in the US because we’re too stupid to use it properly.)

After leaving Charles de Gaulle, it took about 20 minutes to reach Gallieni, where I debarked. (FYI: according to Wikipedia, Gallieni is named after General Joseph Gallieni, who commandeered 600 taxis in order to get his troops to 1914’s First Battle of the Marne. Don’t know if that’s true, but—if it is—it’s an interesting story!)

And now that I was in Gallieni, it was time for my Parisian adventure to begin...