25th June 2010 – The Queuing Mentality

It hadn’t been long enough, just fourteen short days at home to put away my winter clothes and rediscover my family and my t-shirts and shorts. I had barely had time to catch trains to Edinburgh and York for fleeting reunions with friends and to spend a few nights in my own bed. How could I possibly be there already, bag checked in – yes, I packed it myself; who in their right mind would admit to having lent it to a friendly- looking terrorist for five minutes? – sitting with Jon at a gnome-sized coffee table on two comfortable mock-leather chairs of oddly giant proportions and nursing our mugs of coffee. The early morning trip to the airport was one of those parental duties that he claimed not to mind, although I was sure that he would really rather have spent another two hours asleep. 

We passed the hour discussing the difference in price between coffees at different establishments - as if it mattered - and my sister’s plans for the future, and how we’d hate to work in an airport, and anything, anything, to avoid thinking about what I was about to do. 

I was on my way to doing the most exciting, least academic and therefore possibly most terrifying thing I had ever done. I was WWOOFing. WWOOF, standing for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, was to be my life and my work for the following seven weeks. I would be working on three farms in the south of France, my labour in exchange for a bed, three meals a day and – I hoped – a better level of French to help me through the forthcoming final year of my languages degree. Actually, the bed and the meals were just a hope, too. I had no way of knowing for sure whether my hosts would uphold their end of the bargain. All I had was cheerfully nervous blind faith.

With the nearest teaspoon I stole spurfles of whipped cream from the top of Jon’s drink because there was none on mine. As children, my sister and I had liked to take the sugar-cubes that come with coffees and dunk them in our parents’ cups for a bittersweet treat. But then they stopped drinking coffee so much, or maybe we just grew up, and the sugar-cube dunking was no more. As an adult, on the very rare occasions that I bought myself a black coffee, I always took a moment to be a child. I wondered if Emily did too.  

As the cream melted away on my tongue, I watched the boys behind my dad and wondered how long they had been there for, asleep on each others’ shoulders. The dark bags under their eyes added to the weight of the luggage scattered around them. The eldest seemed to sense my curiosity and opened his eyes, which connected with mine for a startled microsecond before I turned them back to Jon’s conversation. Where were they going, those boys? To Turkey, or Greece, or wherever their olive skin was from? For a holiday or to visit family? Or were they going for good? Did I think it was time to move? No, I still had the dregs of my accidentally cold latte. Just five minutes more. 

Soon enough there was no more coffee. It was time, then. We found the queue for the departures lounge and Jon hugged me, kissing me on the cheek, telling me to enjoy myself. I used to hate hugs. My teenaged self thought they showed weakness, weakness and emotion. And that was fine for other people, but I had wanted to be strong and dependable, and the two couldn’t be mixed. That’s how I had felt at the time, anyway. He disappeared into the crowd and I inched forward, going through the contents of my hand luggage in my mind, checking for contraband items. Once, a long time ago, Emily had packed a pair of red plastic scissors in her bag and they had been confiscated by security. She was nine. What had they thought that she was going to do, storm the cockpit by force and poke the pilot’s knee? 

My bag may have been free of daggers and bottles of potentially explosive mineral water, but I still felt a little tense as I went through the metal detector. I hoped that my bra didn’t set it off! The last time I had been frisked, the woman frisking me had told me not to worry because the detectors sometimes just went off and it didn’t mean anything. So why were they there then, if they didn’t even work properly? I knew the answer, but still I wondered how many bombs were actually intercepted each year at airport security gates. Apparently I wasn’t suspected of terrorism this time though, as both my body and my bag passed through the security area without comment. What a relief to discover that I wasn’t actually a suicide bomber. 

I sipped at a bottle of freshly-bought water as I sat at the gate. I wasn’t thirsty, but it was better than biting my fingernails. A few families took seats near me, and I gave them a mental scolding for having taken their children out of school before the holidays had begun. I laughed at myself, so clearly the daughter of a school teacher.  There were also a couple of business men, and a few well- dressed young guys plugged into headphones, staring straight ahead as if their music held them in a trance, hypnotised by the soundtracks to their lives.  I couldn’t see any other lone young women. I liked that, being the only one. It made my adventure seem more unique somehow.

A monk! A monk with little round glasses and a tatty blue rucksack! It struck me as an odd choice of luggage for a monk. I got my phone out to text Emily about him. We monk-spotted in my family. Monks versus nuns. Norbert Dentressangle lorries versus hay-bale transporters. Nuns and Norberts always won, so a monastic victory was a rare one. I always got a small rush of satisfaction when the underdogs came out on top.

Hoping the monk, who Emily suggested might be called Norbert, would be sitting next to me on the plane, I joined the queue of travellers. I would have loved to talk to a monk, especially one with a kind, whiffley hamster face like Norbert. I would find out about life in the monastery. Were the beds comfy? Did they take it in turns to do the laundry? Did they play Snakes and Ladders in their spare time, and go for country walks? What did they eat for breakfast? All the important things. Instead I took off next to a large greying man and his apologetic-eyed wife. Was she apologising for sitting next to me? I felt like assuring her that I wasn’t hiding hypodermic needles behind my smile and that security had already stripped me of potential terrorist status, and that she could relax. I suspected though that such a reassurance might have quite the opposite effect.

Norbert or no Norbert, no interesting conversation seemed to be forthcoming, so as England disappeared from underneath me, I watched the cities and fields merge into sea into fields and cities. My mind was racing ahead, wondering what the next two months would bring me, wondering with whom I would meet and what I would do. There were too many unknowns for me to feel excited at the prospect of what lay ahead, and yet neither was I particularly nervous. In emotional limbo, I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists and winced as we touched down, hoping that the pilot would hit the runway with both wheels. He did. Bonjour la France.

 

I was in no rush. Fellow travellers pushed past me as if they were late for a job interview. Last through border control, I smiled at the policeman who didn’t smile back. It must have been a pretty grim job sitting in a glass box all day, like the iguana who lived in a tank at my junior school, stared at by children who didn’t understand why it was there; it stared back with boredom and a negligible nod. 

My rucksack was already doing the rounds of the carousel by the time I reached it. Carousel struck me as being a misleading word. It conjured up images of gold-painted rope-like bars, wooden horses mid-gallop and stationary coaches that might have been pumpkins once upon a fairytale, and memories of warm French summer habourside evenings with the smells of peanuts caramelising and doughnuts and blue candyfloss, and the taste of the best ice cream in the world. There must have been a whole host of children who, after a long, confining flight, heard the magic c word and built up dreams of a fantasy merry-go round, to be met with disappointment and whingeing at the sight of the big black tapeworm disappearing into the wall, and their parents pointing out the octolingual DO NOT SIT ON THE CAROUSEL sign. Surely I wasn’t the only one with a runaway imagination.  

The transfer bus was harder to find than I had anticipated and once I had located the blue and white bus hanging in two dimensions from the ceiling, the queue was long and people kept on pushing in. I found queues to be the natural habitat of the British; nobody else quite seemed to respect them. I learned that during the nine months just gone that I had spent teaching in Germany: my frequent bakery trips for Brötchen had often come with a side-order of frustration.  

Caught up in a stream of suitcases, my ticket was stamped and I found myself on the coach. All the seats were taken, so I snuggled into a space on the luggage rack, only to be thrown off by the conductor and told to wait for a seat. So with an already validated ticket and almost without my rucksack, I hopped back down to the tarmac. Second time lucky. Sitting next to a grandma who had just picked her two exhausted Guatemalan granddaughters up from the airport, I hit the left-hand side of the road to Lyon.

Once in Lyon, a long, hot, sweaty, polluted straight road of an hour took me towards my bed for the night. Two rivers, two bridges and two buckets of perspiration later and I was at the bottom of a very steep hill, halfway up which the hostel appeared to be. In for a penny, in for a couple of euros, I started my sweaty climb, rucksack squelching hotly against my shoulder blades. In a moment of madness I ignored the funicular. By the time I reached the hostel I realised that there was definitely a reason that funicular contained the word fun, and that it was fun that I had missed out on. I collected the full range of odd looks as I made my way up, ending with the confused amusement of the hesitant young receptionist at Youth Hostel Vieux Lyon.  It was his first day, or at any rate I hoped it was, because he was as slow as a broken-legged sloth; if he wasn’t new there was no excuse for it. After the momentary heart-lurching panic of not being able to find my passport in my bag because it was in my pocket, he told me to come back for a map once I’d settled into my room. Mistake. After wringing out my shirt over the basin and changing into clothes better suited to the heat wave, I took my place at the back of the continental-style queue. 

I waited. Why were youth hostels always painted in nursery school colours? The terrace looked dirty and uninviting. Someone on television scored a World Cup goal and a lone suntan cheered in his seat. Did the woman in the corner really heart Mallorca? If so, why? If not, why had she bought that t-shirt? I pondered my way through 45 minutes of boredom before I gave up, mapless.

At the bottom of the hill, the old quarter of the city from which my hostel took its name, Vieux Lyon, was a warren of narrow cobbled streets filled with early evening bustle. It put me in mind of a family holiday to Sorrento, except that these streets were lined with forest green crèperies and postcard stalls rather than Limoncello and leather shops. Families and couples and laughing, chattering groups of friends milled around me. Looking up, I saw light yellow plastered walls, four storeys of long unlit windows, wrought-iron street lamps and a thin strip of light, bright, perfectly cyan blue sky.  With no desire to stay engulfed in the crowd, I wandered on in the opposite direction to the hostel. I hadn’t come to France to feel endangered by armies of ice-cream wielding toddlers.

There were pretty areas of Lyon, but somehow - probably because I had no map, or else because they were concentrated into Vieux Lyon - I passed them by. I chose instead to flip-flop down roads which could have been or led anywhere, speeding up through a stifled sunless backstreet of rug-shops, halva, boarded windows and bearded men. I saw parts of the city which had never appeared in a tourist guide, and it was all the more interesting. History was all well and good, but the living breathing city where the living breathing people resided fascinated me more. I headed towards the river. 

The whitestone steps of the riverbank were full of early evening sunbathers. There was a little girl I watched in particular, dressed in a pink sundress with hair half dusty wicker, half sun halo. She was dabbling in a tiny rivulet, fascinated by her own reflection. I was aware of a man watching me watching her watching her inverted, rippling Siamese twin, and no doubt he in turn was the subject of someone else’s fleeting attention. To sit there meant to be studied. I wondered what he made of me, with my couscous and grated carrot salad and bag of smoked almonds, sitting alone and apparently doing nothing. I wondered what life story he gave me in his mind, and how far it differed from reality. 

The sun was disappearing slowly behind a stately-looking building on the opposite bank, casting everything into silhouettes. The black dome against the stark white sky and the silent cyclists pedalling in two-dimensions against the monochrome water were a still from an arthouse film in which I was the protagonist.  A young Frenchman came up to me and asked if he could have some water for his girlfriend who looked quite ill. I gave my half-empty bottle to him, and he soon returned it. I wished after he left that I’d told him to keep it, but they were retreating up the steps by the time I’d turned around, her body slumped against his for support.  

I let myself sit five minutes longer on the chalk whiteness, feeling the residual warmth of the absorbed sunlight through my palms before making my way back to the hostel. Tomorrow would be an early start; today required an early end.

Flip, flop, flip, ouch, flip, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. New shoes hadn’t been a good idea. I took them off and slung them in my bag at the next pedestrian crossing, setting forth bare-footed and bloody between the toes. Portugal had just won the football. Horns started to sound from roads all over the city and a car full of jubilant supporters drove past, waving a Portuguese flag. 

The hostel was fairly quiet and I was looking forward to an early night, as was one of my roommates. A Canadian student who never introduced herself to me, she was travelling around Europe just as I had a few years earlier, and for a while we shared travel horror stories. My worst travelling experience had involved multiple breakdowns on a six-hour-long Croatian train journey during a heat wave whilst travelling with my friend Catherine. There was no air conditioning, of course. We had run out of food and water, and there was a distinct lack of serviceable toilets. A disgustingly dirty hostel greeted us at the end of the day. It was so bad that Catherine and I coined a new word; our destination turned into an adjective to describe the worst kind of day: zagrebby.