Finally in Grenoble

I'm finally in Grenoble and I finally have somewhat reliable Internet access. The last 9 days have been a whirlwind! The flight from Newark to Geneva was brutal - almost 7 hours. There were TV screens positioned throughout the cabin that displayed the plane's location in real-time. Watching us cross the Atlantic was really depressing.

I had 8 hours to wait in Geneva before my flight to Nice. Brutal. I wanted to go out and explore, but I had nowhere to leave my bags and really no idea what to do or where to go. Plus, the ATM machines only dispensed Swiss francs - and what was I going to do with them once I went to France?

I flew EasyJet from Geneva to Nice. They weren't so Easy. I had to pay $64 because my largest suitcase was 8 kilograms heavier than their weight allowance. Granted, it was a behemoth. I think at it's heaviest, it was 35 or 40 kilos. (To get that weight in pounds, multiply by 2.2 - so, between 77 and 88 pounds.) I tried to take the bag containing the jeu de boule, but the x-ray security personnel wouldn't let me past with it... I was frightened to find out how much that weighed, but mercifully they just checked it at the gate and didn't make me pay for that... because I'm sure it would've been obscene. It came out in decent shape once I retreieved it from the luggage carousel in Nice.

Nice was gorgeous - for the 20 minutes or so I saw of it from the plane while landing (during which I looked past the Finnish man lecturing me about George W. Bush and gazed at the Mediterranean), and the 20 minutes that I rode the bus with my friend Julien and his boyfriend Florian from the airport to the train station. Julien and I took a train to Marseille, and then a bus to Aix-en-Provence (I'll try to find a map of France and pinpoint these locations later), where we took a taxi to his apartment. After climbing 8 flights of stairs... I heaved a sigh of relief and relaxed... for a bit. I showered and collapsed on his bed in his room - the last furnished room in the apartment, since he was moving to another apartment on the other side of the city and the landlord was coming in two days to go through a moving-out checklist - while he slept on a mat in the living room like some Hindu guru. I felt bad for about 4 seconds, and then fell into the densest sleep of my life.

To be continued... in the next post, we'll hear about moving to Julien's new apartment, exploring Aix at night, traveling to Marseille... again... and then to, eventually, Les Arcs Draguignan, where I had my first experience with a tiny French car as Julien's uncle and another miscellaneous male family relative met us and drove us to Plan de la Tour, the tres petit village of 2,000 people that Johnny Depp calls home - and where I would spend the next five days. I'll try to start uploading pictures, too! (Alas, my camera has only a short time to live... I forgot its charger aux Etats-Unis. Crap.)