Scribbles from my diary on the tram...

*** Check for update on Project Pastry***

"I am colour vomit. I'm sitting on the tram on my way to rugby practice with my green/orange/brown coat and the scarf Meme knit for me around my neck. It looks like colour exploded all over me in this city of black trench coats and brown tweed, but I don't care."

"Thoughts from today:
While narrating my own life at lunch I wrote mentally in my head that I was "relishing" my pickles and the pun never really left me.
....
Today I could but smile as I realized my french sociologie de la famille et de l'ecole prof who's hands shake so bad sometimes he can't flip through his notes had pressed leaves stuck all in his papers - as if he collects them. The thought of this portly man with a grandfather's smile who thinks that feminism is dead stooping to pick up a choice leaf for pressing amuses me.
....
A man in the tram today with a shaved head but white stubble and yet wearing young people's clothes... he was wearing glasses so I couldn't see his eyes. An albino in Strasbourg?
He had great style anyway.
.....
Got a long message from Meagan and one from Andrew. Made me feel good that I haven't been forgotten.
....
I ate all three of my meals alone today. Does that make me anti-social or pathetic?"


I know you're all probably wondering about my trip to Paris & Vimy (I am so egotistical to think that anyone who occasionally peruses this thing hangs on to my every thought and adventure, but then I guess blogs are a kind of virtual narcissism to begin with...).
I will try my best to actually type it up, but I hate when these blogs get so longgggg...
I will start from the very end, so that when you actually get around to reading them, they will be in order.

Vimy Ridge: November 11th, 2008
You can just see the monument on the ridge in the distance. We used it like the landmark it was to get to the Memorial site.
The following is a tale of adventure and excitement.

11:52 am
(ish, come on, I don't know what time it really was)
Got in at the station in Avion. Being a holiday, and a small town, the streets were abandoned. Not even the train station was open.
Met up with a group of Canadian guys also headed to the monument. Set off for that white spec in the distance.

Sometime later...
Hiked along highway for a time, then decided to cut through the fields. Definitely an interesting choice as the fields were mostly mud. Thanked God many times that day that I had changed out of my leggings and flats and into my sneakers and raggedy jeans at the last minute that morning...

The cool thing about trudging across the French country side was that you kind of got a feel what it must have been like for those soldiers, almost a hundred years ago. I was carrying my 30L backpack (which is NOTHING compared to the what, 70lbs bags they had to slug around?) and even then the wind was pushing me around (it's very windy in Vimy). Having your shoes get all clumped and heavy with mud... marching off to battle?! It must have been pretty shitty. And the marching would have been peaches compared to living in a trench for two weeks...
About an hour into our mission across the Vimy country side we found this little Canadian cemetery, and it was actually a really moving moment. Everyone kind of split up and wandered around this cemetery, in awe and disbelief - almost all the gravestones were of soldiers our age. I saw as young as 17, as old as 32, but the majority were age 20, 22, 21. I have never even booked my own plane flight, and these boys were in a foreign country, handed guns and told to kill human beings? A hard thing to wrap your mind around.

We kept humping for a while and then it started to rain. That's when we decided to find the highway again and try hitchhiking to the site. After a few excited minutes of taking photos of poppies growing by the side of the highway, we caught our lift. She was my stereotypical French woman, driving one of those old little cars (like in the Bourne Identity) and smoking a cigarette. I sat in front and one of the guys hopped in the trunk and she drove us all the way to the site, dropped us off, and went back with a bigger car to pick up the rest of the group. I couldn't get over how nice she was.

It was really cold and windy up there, but the monument looked really pretty when the sunlight hit it, like it was all lit up. There were names all over the sides, completely covering the lower walls, of all the soldiers' whose bodies had not been found.
It was around 2 pm when I realized my train was at 5:30 and that it had taken us almost two hours just to get to the monument. So I headed back on my own this time, through the "Vimy foret dominale" (sp?) and worried about catching my train, and whether I was even going in the right direction.
Decided to hitchhike back down to the train station, and thus met a really nice Quebecois couple living in Paris and a dad and his daughter that dropped me off right at the station...
.... the only problem was that I was at the station by 2:45pm, and that the whole town around me was closed.

Hung out at a small cafe for a while (coffee makes the hunger go away, the French don't really eat breakfast, so I had a few madelaine's that morning, and a piece of stolen baguette and cheese that the guys had taken from their hostel), and then just decided I'd wait at the train station until my train came through.

To Be Continued...