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in Le Crayon
Saturday, October 29 2016
Off the west bank of the Saône, Chalon-sur-Saône, France
There would be one more meal, breakfast, and after that we'd been told that we wouldn't be allowed to return to our cabins. Down in the dining room, it seems a lot of people had the same idea we had: take as much bread and cheese as possible for snacking on the travel to whatever was next. The staff had entered a decidedly "fuck it" mode (or, alternatively, they'd contracted senioritis). Not only was this the last they'd be seeing of us, but it was their last voyage of the season. So the bread didn't get replenished very quickly and hardly anyone was coming around with coffee to replenish our cups. Meanwhile Gretchen was trying to figure out why she couldn't check in to our flight back home early tomorrow morning. Her cellphone didn't work in France, so she was using Dirk's (the very busy guy trying to coordinate the voyage's wind-down) but then she wound up on endless hold and at some point Dirk really needed his phone back.
Meanwhile, everyone was saying their goodbyes. We'd all been together in each others' business or a whole week, so it was a little surprising (and a bit of a relief) how little physical contact attended our group's dissolution. I think I saw Gretchen hug exactly one person (Michelle). I hugged nobody and shook only a single hand (one belonging to Andrew, the Google guy).
Our plane would be flying out of Lyon, and we'd decided to spend the night in a Lyon hotel near the train station with regular trains to the airport. To get to Lyon, though, we'd need to take a train 80 miles back south again. We tried to share a cab to the Chalon-sur-Saône with Nathan and Christina, but the cabby insisted we take a second cab. It wasn't a long ride, but it was expensive.
Gretchen hit it off right away with the guys selling tickets in the train station. They told her that her French was good and her accent was great. And then, once they'd learned we were American, told us of their past and future travels there. Nathan and Christina arrived at the train station right behind us, but they'd bought a slightly different ticket than the one we'd bought and so they didn't think they could ride the train with us to Lyon. (Had Gretchen been in their position, that wouldn't've stopped her, but few people are like Gretchen when it comes to such things.)
As is often the case, I boarded our train with a rather urgent need to use the bathroom. And when I say "use the bathroom," I mean number two, not number one. You may recall that I had a rather suspenseful experience with a train bathroom back when Gretchen and I were in Italy in 2011. I soon found that toilets on this train to Lyon were rather similar to that Italian one. Some bathroom doors wouldn't open (or the doors only looked like bathroom doors) and one had a toilet so full of shit that I immediately abandoned it. When I finally found a toilet with operable door and a toilet that wasn't totally disgusting, it came as a huge relief. But after I'd filled it with my own human pudding, I realized that not only was there no working water in this bathroom (either from the sink or to flush the toilet), but there was no toilet paper either. I don't know about you, but my vegan diet generally gives me watery stools, and if I don't have some way to tidy up back there, well, I don't really know what happens. But I've seen chickens and cows with this problem, and it's not pretty. I don't wear underwear and I hadn't brought any sort of paper (such as a magazine) into the bathroom, and it was devoid of paper of any sort. Basically, I was stuck with my butt the way it was with no way to wipe or wash. Clearly I was going to have to leave the bathroom in this state. My solution was to wear my pants as low as I could on my hips (not quite gangsta style, but heading in that direction), abandon the bathroom in its now-deplorable state, and walk stiff-legged to another bathroom in hopes of finding toilet paper, water, or both. Somehow I lucked out and the next bathroom I found had both water and toilet paper. When I returned to my seat near Gretchen, I declared, "Now the story can be told." "What's the story?" she asked. It was my first telling of my second European train bathroom story.
After that bit of excitement, we had a long, quiet ride down to Lyon. For most of the ride we could have our bags on the seat beside us, but a couple stops before Lyon, the train got crowded.
The train dumped us out in Gare de Lyon-Part-Dieu, a big train station in the relatively ugly east-side of the city. The hope was we could get a room in the adjacent (and inexpensive) Hotel Athena. But no, they had no rooms. So then we had to schlep from one hotel to the next asking if there were vacancies, but there never were. And most of the hotel employees struck Gretchen as rude. "You work in the hospitality industry," Gretchen imagined telling one such rude hotel clerk. We didn't have WiFi or cell service to enable research, it was cold and cloudy, and, though we'd packed light, we were carrying all our stuff. The only thing the day had going for it was that it wasn't raining. Gretchen thought we should head back to the train station to see if there was some sort of information kiosk to help us out. We went into a Relay store (which specializes in books, magazines, and travel gadgets) to ask where information might be found. Apparently there was no such thing. There was, however, a very helpful young man who spoke fairly good English who tried to help Gretchen find vacancies on his battered smartphone via a site called Booking.com. We didn't have much luck, though. Eventually we decided to hike to the Radison Blu, which was apparently part of the second-tallest skyscraper in Lyon (a brownish building nicknamed "Le Crayon" for its cylindrical body and pointy apex). Along the way, as we passed beneath a building that later turned out to be part of a massive shopping mall, we found some structures we could get behind for the privacy sufficient to urinate.
We entered the Crayon at the Radison entrance at its basement. From there, the elevator went directly to the 32nd floor. That was the Radison lobby, whose rooms formed a eight-story honeycomblike structure around a cylindrical void reaching all the way to Le Crayon's apex. Gretchen marched up to the desk and inquired about whether there was a room for us. There was, but the price would be $300/euro a night. When Gretchen expressed the idea that that was a lot of money, the clerk said, "It's a four star hotel." We decided to sit down on a nearby couch to collect our thoughts. We soon found that there was public WiFi available, and though Gretchen couldn't get Expedia.com to work, she remembered the guy at Relay using that site called Booking.com. For some reason this worked, and Gretchen was able to get us a room in this very same hotel for 180 euros. That was also expensive, but we were tired of fucking around. Unfortunately, check-in time was at 2:00pm and it was only noon. Gretchen then turned her attention to why she couldn't check us in to tomorrow's flight, something she needed a phone to fix. Eventually the desk clerk relented and let her use his, and Gretchen learned that the whole problem was that she was trying to check-in on Delta.com, when she needed to be doing it on AirFrance.com. The whole flight itinerary had been booked through Delta, so it seemed checking in through Delta should've worked. Evidently not.
With all that squared away, we could check our bags in with the Radisson staffer at the bottom of the crayon and go find some vegan food. Gretchen had found a vegan restaurant about a mile away called Against the Grain, so we walked there, passing at least two butcher shops and many landmine-like dog turds along the way. When we got into Against the Grain, we found an incredibly humid atmosphere that immediately fogged up my glasses. The waitstaff had all made themselves up to look like zombies (perhaps for Halloween, though it didn't seem Halloween was all that important in France given the absence of decorations). There was brunch happening, but we'd arrived late for it, and the remaining food was being saved for those who had made a reservation. So we'd come all this way and there was no vegan food for us. And no, I wasn't interested in cookies. (This is in keeping with the way the French of doing things generally; there's always at least a little bit of asshole in their every interaction, though this might just be a culture clash between Gretchen's effusiveness and cold Germanic French reserve.) So as we walked back towards our hotel, Gretchen broke out the bread and cheese we'd squirreled away at breakfast.
There was still a possible way to salvage the food situation: a vegan grocery store called Un Monde Vegan. After some walking and a little searching, we found it. It was just a little store, and the only products it sold were the processed meat and cheese substitutes that a vegan would normally combine with fresh bread and produce. We stocked up on "chicken" seitan nuggets, a bag of vegan croissants, some sort of cheese that didn't turn out to be very good, seitan cutlets, a jar of chili-con-tofu and a jar of vegan ravioli. The guy working there was uncharacteristically nice, at least by French standards. He was sort of a hipster, if, that is, wallet chains are still a thing. The only thing we needed after that was a loaf of proper French bread, and we found the perfect thing somewhere on the walk back to our hotel.
The Radison may be a four star hotel, but they didn't have a simple item that must get requested all the time: a European-outlet-to-American-plug adapter, the kind joyfully loaned to me when Gretchen and I stayed in the Hotel La Pérouse in the appropriately-named city of Nice. So after we set up in our little room (which also lacked corkscrew! In France!), I set out to get the proper electrical adapter. I hiked back to the train station and went into that Relay store, but all the adapters there seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Strange as it might seem, it didn't seem that the product I sought was available in the train station. I crossed the street back in the direction of Le Crayon and entered what seemed like the largest shopping mall I'd ever been in (and I've been in that one in King of Prussia, PA). It had an interior atrium revealing what looked like five or six floors, but that was just the vertical dimension. It sprawled so much horizontally that streets were forced to tunnel under it (like the one we'd found places to piss along). Despite all the stores, there didn't seem to be many places selling the small trinkets normally sold in America in drug stores. Remember, they don't have drug stores in France. Had I been looking for perfume, women's underwear, or a computer tablet, I would've been fine. (Apple stores and things like Apple stores seem to be common in France.) Eventually, though, I came upon a store called Fnac that seemed similar to an American Best Buy. It sold everything from toasters to laptop computers. In one neglected corner, I found the adapter I needed, though it had a lot of extra bulky plastic on it just to ensure that a grounded plug couldn't be inserted. All that would have to be removed, if only to conserve the space in my computer bag.
Back at our room in Le Crayon, Gretchen was snacking down on the jar of ravioli, which was proving unexpectedly good. That had come as a recommendation from Nathan and Christina, and they had not been wrong. I broke out some crude tools (a cigarette lighter I'd found on the ground near the amphitheatres in Lyon and the screwdrivers I'd bought to fix a drowned laptop keyboard in Los Angeles) and proceeded to hack away at the plastic on the adapter I'd just bought. I quickly broke off one of the smaller screwdriver bits, so from then on I used the lighter to heat the bits so I could cut away at unwanted plastic via melting. This worked okay, though eventually the handle for the screwdriver began melting to. Ultimately I gave up and ripped that stupid grounding pin off my laptop power cord; it hadn't been doing anything useful anyway.
I turned my attention to two small bottles of wine we'd taken from our cabin on the boat. Without a corkscrew, I was forced to press corks down into the bottle using a butter knife, a technique I haven't used since I was desperately-broke 20-something. It works fine so long as you intend to drink the whole bottle. And since we wouldn't be able to take it with us on the plane, that was the idea.
By now, Gretchen had the poignantly silly animated gothic feature entitled Corpse Bride on the room's television set. It was a compelling enough Tim Burton film for me to pay attention and watch. It was also something of a musical, and, amazingly, I actually liked some of the music. I found the scene where one of the characters dissolves into a cloud of moths deeply moving and haunting.
When I wasn't watching teevee or snacking on the various food options (most of which were proving better than expected), I was obsessively checking the news. Last night at dinner, Michelle had broken the news about FBI Director Comey's statement regarding a new trove of "Clinton emails" that had been discovered, this time on Anthony Weiner's computer. Anthony Weiner, you'll recall, is the disgraced & estranged husband of close Clinton aid Huma Abedin, infamous for his compulsive sexting (most recently to a 15 year old girl while his young son was in the room). This is precisely the sort of late-breaking news that throws elections, and Michelle was convinced that now Clinton would lose. She reasoned that low-information voters would now combine Clinton in their mind with sexting and the recently-villified concept of "email" (something a lot of Baby Boomers still don't really understand), and it would be all Trump would need to win. By today, the content of from Comey's announcement was still open to interpretation, which of course allows people to imagine anything they want. And Donald Trump was out on the campaign trail helping people with poor imaginations imagine the worst.
Given all the food we had on hand, there was no need to leave our hotel room. Gretchen set the alarm for 5:00am so we'd be at the Lyon airport in time for our flight to Paris and then JFK.
France is full of graffiti, and Gretchen got very excited when she saw some expressing a pro-vegan attitude. Somewhere between Le Crayon and Against the Grain in Lyon. Click to Enlarge.
This ravioli was amazingly good. The chili was good too, though I don't have a picture of that.
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