A continuation of my late posts briefly recapping a couple of things that happened on my family trip to Italy and France.
I mentioned in my last post that we finished our time in Italy with a fantastic couple of days in Cinque Terre. I was expecting something like an open Disney Land full of tourists, but was delightfully surprised that we saw almost no tourists while we were there. Now, we just had to find tickets to Paris where we were supposed to spend our next night. Unfortunately, everyone we talked to assured us that there were no tickets to anywhere in France from anywhere in Italy until six days later. What the hee? We decided to take a train to Milan where we’d hopefully have more luck, and we sort of did, but not really.
In Venice, we were told that there was nothing, but Brian had the bright idea to take a train to Geneva. The thought hadn’t entered my head, because the last thing I wanted to do was go to another country when we had an apartment booked in Paris. It was a smart idea though, because Geneva is a big city and borders France. I thought that it was an hour or so from the border, but the airport actually has signs that say “France” with an arrow pointing thataway. Brian, Shawn, Minh and I went out that night to a North African lounge and relaxed for a couple hours, but soon returned back to the airport with the fam. I dazzled my family with my French, as they couldn’t tell how bad I am, and got us some tickets to Paris leaving the next morning. Now, we had two choices: spend a fortune on a hotel for about 6 hours or sleep in the train station. Again, we chose the latter.
The last time I slept in an airport was in Milan with Minh a few days prior. I printed out the entry where I wrote about it and showed it to my students to teach them some slang. Some of them were amused that their teacher slept on an airport conveyor belt, some of them slept themselves. But that story has nothing on our experience in Geneva. Imagine a group of nine foreigners (a family, girlfriends and a friend) sleeping in a train station. Actually, we couldn’t even sleep in the train station because they closed it and kicked us out of our suitcase locker bedrooms. We had to sleep in the underground. My mom sleeping in what Brian calls the bowels of Geneva. This is an appropriate word, because it was a real shithole.
The Geneva underground was freezing cold. It wasn’t as cold as my night with Minh in Milan, but it was hardly comfortable. We tried sleeping in a large elevator but it kept going up by itself into the closed train station with guards walking around. Again, I didn’t sleep. The place was also full of crazies. I think our night reached a peak when a multilingual drug addict approached my family (aged 16 to 57) and asked us if we had a crack pipe, to which my mom promptly replied, “No sir.” ”No problem,” he assured us, “I’ll just sniff it. Au revoir.” This will probably be the last night my mom spends sleeping underground. This night, nicknamed “The Geneva Prison Experiment,” will go down in history.
I haven’t been posting videos as I had planned, so here’s a short one from Brian.
You can also download the video here.
Next stop better be Paris.
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