En train de...

Right now I am in a train on my (I guess) last excursion outside of town. I took the cheaper non-TGV line to Toulouse, and now have about 3 hours left of Limoges and Brive La Gaillard and other places I have never stopped. But it is nine o’clock in May and the sun is setting and the train moves slowly enough for the towns to be visible in the sunset and it is charming. I have only vague ideas about when trains went out of style in the US (ripped apart by the automotive and oil industries is my favorite story) but in any case it was a truly sad thing for romanticism. Frankly, I don’t understand why anyone would take a plane within France.

About six years ago I went on an Eastern European trip with a girlfriend and we took a train from Riga to Moscow whose dark exhaust hinted at coal. We were packed in with a hundred Russians who kept getting up and thudding to the back of the train with glass mugs and teabags to access a water tap heated by the engines. I rented a glass that looked something like the brilliant rendering below and tried to follow suit. Julia made a friend in the smoker’s compartment and they bonded over linguistically incompatible conversation. Their absurdist repartee was so pleasingly fluid that the woman dropped by regularly, unlit cigarette in hand, to pick up my friend on her way back to nicotineland and continue their chat. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen on planes.

brilliant rendering of russian tea glasses

On planes I end up trying to sleep folded onto the tray table or wedged up against the wall while some seatmate probes: “gee, it must be so neat to live in PARis”. I stand in line for the restroom and hover above the metallic seat while trying not to wonder where the speeding vortex goes. On this Latvia-Russia train it was obvious. You could see the tracks through the hole in the ground. Mystery solved, thankfully in sensible shoes.

When we got to the border between the two countries, we caused a half hour delay. We were interrogated in two languages we didn’t speak about our luggage (I think). We looked at each other and tried to neither laugh nor cry, waving our red passports and pointing to our tickets while the other passengers watched. Stone-faced does not do their gaze justice. I was especially paranoid, as my friend had insisted on hiding a piece of clandestine hash in a tampon applicator in her toiletries bag. All the ads I’ve ever seen for those movies where people are kept in sketchy prisons for crimes they didn’t commit raced through my head until the customs people just gave up and the train got moving again.

It was awesome.

On the way back from Amsterdam a couple of years ago, a trip taken with a group of my closest friends from Paris and one from California in part to celebrate the defense of my Masters thesis, we spent the entire time in the bar car. It was one of the best parts of the trip. We cleaned them out, and laughed so hard we cleared out the car itself. Although, not completely it would seem the next day when I received a text message from some guy I didn’t remember, asking to hang out with Dre before she went back to the US. Needless to say, it went unanswered.

I remember my first train trip in France, when I was fourteen going with my grandmother from Nice to Toulouse. She knitted, and kept pestering me to stop reading and look out the window. I didn’t want to look out the window. I wanted everyone to think I was refined and European and not with this high-pitched dyed-hair old lady who kept trying to lovingly feed me fabulous egg and salad sandwiches. I was, obviously, totally wrong to not take advantage of the images of cows and sunflower fields rolling past, but what are you going to do. There would be time to catch up on the pastoral eye-candy. Roughly six hours per, if you are counting from Paris to Toulouse.

The last time my mother visited, she and her boyfriend took a train from Paris to Rome. There was some bizarre condition with her US reservation that meant they had to (surprise!) stand in line and confirm their travel before boarding the train. In the end, they arrived, running, just as the train was leaving. I had a heated argument with the guy on the quai and he shrugged his shoulders. “Désolé.” But as we were turning around to go home and drink more wine to forget, he called to me. The train had stopped. Something about a door being jammed open. He helped them onto the train and they made it to Rome, reservations intact and (I’d like to think) souls invigorated by their near-miss.

With planes there are no near-misses. When you have an early flight you have to sleep at the frickin airport. JFK, Athens, Stockholm. I have done it MANY MANY TIMES. AND IT SUCKS. There are no last-minute door delays. You have to sit in the plane for hours on the runway, waiting for them to figure it out. Not drinking water. Not walking around.  Just sitting, waiting so that you can sit some more a thousand more feet up. The plane is not the friend of those of us who sometimes (always) arrive a teensy bit (half hour) late.

sleep-train goody bag

In a few days I will take the night train back to Paris, and slip into my mid-level compartment, complete with blanket-satchel and plastic-wrapped hygienic and surprisingly comfortable pillow, as well as a goody-bag sleep assortment and bottle of water, all provided by the train company. I will arrive back in town probably an hour behind schedule and have the option of paying too much for a café allongé or taking a two euro shower in surprisingly clean facilities provided for the night-trainers. Then I will calmly take the metro to my teaching gig. No ridiculously long trip into town, no waiting forever for the spinny baggage cart to spit out my mangled bag. No annoying standing in line while tourists try to figure out the ticket-into-town system. All hail rail.

I love trains so much that when the SNCF (train people) bought up teaser ad space in the metro I fell for their ruse immediately. “Coming soon, direct tunnel from Paris to New York!” I was gleeful, imagining the ease of slipping into Gare Du Nord 30m before departure, rolly-bag in hand, going through security measures where I wouldn’t have to take off my shoes. I didn’t care about the physics of the 5851 km underwater tunnel. My fantasy was finally coming true. I felt cheated when the follow-up ad told me I was dreaming, it would never happen, but that you can now reserve flights through their website. Jerks.

I am considering wearing a conductor’s hat on my flight back to San Francisco in mourning and silent protest for my dreams of continued rail travel. 

Gare d'Austerlitz at 815 (i took the coffee, thank you)