Exodus

Surprisingly all train transfers went well. Frankfurt to Karlsruhe to Strasbourg to Metz to Verdun with an enormous suitcase and a sleep deprivation hangover and not a single transfer missed. By the time I got to Verdun I was so pleased with myself that I almost didn’t realise that I had no idea what the person who was picking me up looked like and I had no way of contacting her and assuming she wasn’t a 15 year old girl or an active (male) soldier there was no-one at the train station that could have been her anyway. So I thought…I’m not going to panic, she’s probably just a little late. You’ve been spending too much time in Germany; people aren’t that punctual anywhere else in the world. That said, my first instinct was, of course, to panic; which didn’t really get me anywhere because regardless of how fast my pulse was racing, I was still stuck in the train station in Verdun 45 minutes after I was supposed to be picked up and it was starting to get dark and there was really nothing I could do about it. So I tried to be rational, which is difficult for me even under the best circumstances. I would find a pay phone and call from there, and if that didn’t work I would use my rusty French and utter patheticness to charm the ticket person into giving me directions to the nearest hotel. Then I would bravely set out, on my own in a foreign country, cold and hungry, lugging an obnoxious amount of unnecessary crap, fully aware that I’d probably be lost within 5 minutes. But it’s an adventure, right? That’s what this whole experience is supposed to be about, being self sufficient and learning to fend for myself. This of course scared me more. Overcoming the panic induced urge to vomit, I took a deep breath, stood up and nearly gave myself whiplash as I suddenly spun around at the sound of my name spoken with a soft almost London accent. My saviour had come.

It was all much less dramatic from then on. We introduced ourselves, drove to her apartment, carried my stuff up what seemed like 400,000 stairs (I’m exaggerating, it was probably only 300,000), and then went out for a beer. Afterwards we returned to her vibrantly decorated flat for a lovely home cooked meal and then French language version of Troy, which, as it turns out, is terrible in every language. So, part 1 of the journey has been a success. Soon we move on to part 2: actually going to the town I’ll be living in.