Last day of my french course today. I was the last one to present an article that I’ve researched to the rest of the class. I was hoping for some audience interaction particularly from the two American midwives, but unfortunately they never turned up today. The teacher thought they might have decided to enjoy our first really warm and sunny day, although the rest of the class seemed to think that the two women had found the course very challenging and had probably just decided to ditch the last day because they could. Nobody had any time for my murder/suicide theory. And I never got to tell Peggy I bought her autobiography yesterday on Kindle (yes, a published author in our class! Her autobiography as a midwife spreads across three books, and the first one has been translated into German, and has just been made into an audio book. I’ll tell you if it’s any good. Her full name is Peggy Vincent.)
Anyway, even without the midwives, I thought the topic of the debate in France on the expansion of government funded fertility treatment to include single women and lesbian couples, and the fight against it from weirdy right wing “ultra cathos” might provoke some debate, perhaps from my Italian classmate Francesca who is staying in a nunnery here, but it was just crickets. Perhaps it was too early in the morning to be talking about insemination artificielle. Note that gay male couples don’t appear to get a look in: surrogacy has been illegal here since 1994.
Farewell drinks, including a shot of something horrible with my pétanque buddies, and then it was off on the train to Paris. Saint Jean François had been up at 4 am to take Carolyn to the airport, so it was Saïda who took me to the train station. The train trip was uneventful but please remind me never to buy food on a french train again.
I should have been warned about the hotel I’m staying at in Paris by the daily emails I’ve been getting over the past few days, inviting me to visit the bar while I’m here, check out the art, and other youthful funky type activities. The chain is called CitizenM and it sadly exceeds my low threshold for hipster intolerance. OK, I’m all for reducing human interaction where possible but I’m afraid I’m going to need some guidance. No, youthful bearded person who picked up very quickly that I wasn’t a native french speaker, it’s not my first time staying in one of your hotels but I had forgotten quite what a traumatic process it was so if you could bare with me I’d be grateful. It was only ten minutes later that I found myself on the twelfth floor, after needing only the minimum of assistance from random strangers to make the lift work, holding a keycard with no number on it. As I found out later, apparently the computer would have printed out a piece of paper with my room number at some stage in our interactions but I had no trace of it. Faced with taking the lift back down, I instead decided to try my new keycard on every door on the floor. Twenty doors later, I finally got a green light, but then I couldn’t get the door open. With steam coming out of my ears, a string of swear words coming out my mouth as well as the phrase – so often my mantra in these situations: “I’m not a stupid person, I’m a doctor, it really shouldn’t be this hard”, I took the lift back down to reception. The other young man behind the desk quickly came across to me with a look of concern on his face “oh you poor thing, you look very tired, you must have had a very long flight, is this your first time staying with us?” Apparently as it turns out, there’s a knack to opening the door: you have to hold your card onto the card reader until you get a green light while simultaneously falling forward heavily with both hands in front of you. It’s tricky. Anyway, if they’re so clever, how come the computer screen in my room shows this?:
Amusing – unless Talal walks in on me in the middle of the night, in which case I won’t be laughing any more.
Needing to stretch my legs and regain my usual zen attitude, I decided to go for a walk. I was only five minutes into my attempt at a pleasant stroll along the banks of the Seine when I suddenly found myself on a high wall, ten skull crunching metres above the busy road on my right, and twenty plunging metres above the black waters of the Seine on my left.
I took this photo two minutes before being forced by the rapidly narrowing wall into turning back and retracing my steps. Not the best start for my attempt at clearing my head. I just want to walk along the river for pity’s sake! It’s not like this in the movies… In the end I crossed over to the other side (I can never remember which is the left and which is the right bank). My aim was to have a look at the lights of the Eiffel Tower when they did that sparkly thing they do every hour. As it was by this time well after 8pm, it was a very brisk walk to get me near enough to be able to see it at 9. Luckily I got there just in time.
In the picture it looks a long way away still – but it was close enough for me. I then took the bus back to the hotel. Managing public transport overseas always cheers me up. The young receptionist eyed me warily as I arrived back but I’m pretty serene now. Hoping for a good night’s sleep before my epic journey back home tomorrow (and no business class).