July 13, 2011 -- Waiting for a Train

Sitting in the garden at the pilgrim's hostel in Orisson, France.
Can you tell that I have been drinking wine?

I'm sitting in the one-room passenger rail station in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port looking through the windows at the rain pouring down outside and waiting for a train to Bayonne. That means of course, that I have given up the pilgrimage after only one day on the trail. Last night, my left leg (sciatic nerve) was hurting less, and I felt pretty confident about continuing today. However, this morning a combination of events -- the sciatic nerve problem, the heavy pack, and the miserable weather -- made me realize that the smartest thing to do was to turn back and perhaps attempt the hike another time with a lighter pack and a healthy body. However, after seeing loads of pilgrims zipping by on their bikes, I think the way for a cyclist to do this journey is on a mountain bike. I think even one of my touring bikes with wide tires would work. British Airways flies bikes for free. I will be back!

But back to the narrative.  I left the hostel after breakfast  this morning in the drizzling rain. More accurately, the clouds had descended around us, and the water was condensing right out of the air onto all object including me. As I started down the hill, I heard a voice calling "Jack!" It was a German woman whom I had met on the train coming to Saint-Jean and then run into again last night. She had also decided to turn back and wanted to walk with me. However, I was limping along at a slow pace, and I convinced her to go ahead. Besides, at that moment, I really wanted to be alone and not have a chatty person disturb my self pity.

During the 8-kilometer (5-mile) hike back down the mountain to Saint-Jean, it drizzled off and on, and the pain in my leg rose and fell, varying from feeling almost normal at times to a jolting pain with each step at others.

Now what? If my leg heals in the next several weeks and I can find a place to leave some stuff, I can see trying the hike again. After all, I still have 2-1/2 months left before my flight back to Phoenix. Today, my only goal is to get to Bayonne, get an inexpensive hotel room, get a hot shower, wash some clothes, and think about where I want to go tomorrow. I'm thinking Spain, but I'd rather be on the Mediterranean side, where the weather is drier. I'm not used to cold, drizzling rain in mid-July.

Oh, I had a strange experience with an Italian gentleman last evening. I went into the dining room of the Pilgrim's hostel at Orisson looking for a quiet place to read. A middle-aged gentleman with missing lower front teeth was sitting at a table, and he signaled for me to join him. He turned out to be the only European I have met on the whole trip so far who fit the stereotype of the anti-American European. He claimed that Americans are "second class" and "inferior to Europeans."

Naturally, when someone is that prejudiced, there is no reasoning with the person. I ended up at another table. That evening at supper, were everyone at the table was European but me, several people apologized to me for the man's behavior saying that they hoped I didn't believe all Europeans are like that. Of course, I already knew that the narrow-minded prejudiced people are a minority and that those people exist everywhere. -- Jack

July 11, 2011 -- Bayonne, France

 It's just after 8 a.m. here, and I just spent the night in a quite expensive hotel, despite the fact that the room is small and not at all luxurious. The train from Paris arrived late yesterday, and when I got here, most of the hotels were either full or they were closed for the night. It was also too late to continue my journey to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, which isn't far away. However, because it's a small village, there are only a handful of trains a day that go there.

I was dead tired last night. It was after midnight when I found this hotel, and I was in no mood to continue searching, despite the fact that this room, translated into dollars, set me back almost $190 (breakfast and speedy Internet access included, of course.)

Well, today it's on to Saint Jean, and hopefully tomorrow it's on the trail. I will probably not be able to post every day from now on, because I expect I will have trouble finding Internet access in the small towns I will be hiking through.

At least it's warmer here. I'll have some use today for that sunblock that I've been lugging around. -- Jack

Paris July 8, 2011

I'm not sure that I'm up to this pilgrimage. I hiked halfway across Paris today carrying my day pack with a heavy load in it, from the Ring Road on the Eastside to the Arc of Triumph, and my legs are quite sore. I'll be carrying more weight on the pilgrimage and walking a longer distance  the first day.

I got back to the hostel early enough in the afternoon to watch most of the Tour de France stage on TV. That big crash that split the pack certainly will affect the outcome. I have to hand it to Team HTC, however. They had all of their guys near the front so they missed the crash, and in the final kilometers their six-rider (I think six is the right number) sprint train delivered Mark Cavendish right to the front of the peloton a few hundred meters before the line, where all he had to do was ride hard enough to hold his position to win the stage. No other team had enough riders in the front group to challenge the HTC machine.

By the way, the bleachers are already set up for the end of the final stage in Paris.

There is no need for me to describe the many delights of Paris; they are well known. Instead I'm going to mention three tourist scams I saw today designed to separate the unwary, especially the unwary male, from his money. The are the shell game, the ring drop, and the deaf charity.

The shell game is the classic scam, and here it seems to be run by Russian men, and you can find it in tourist cities all over Europe. The chief scammer shuffles three items on a board, and under one of them is a white card or ball. When he's done shuffling, if you can guess which item the card is under, you win. Several people standing around him are placing bets, and they are winning more than losing, and it looks easy to win. The betters are actually in cahoots with the shuffler, of course. When a potential mark comes by, someone in the audience tells him that taking money from this guy is like taking candy from a baby. If the mark bites and places a bet, he may be allowed to win the first time, but if he keeps playing, he ends up a big loser, and the accomplices among the other betters sympathize with him as he wanders off with a lighter wallet. I didn't get close enough for any of them to invite me to play. I was more interested in observing who all in the audience was part of the gang.

The other two scams are perpetuated by young Gypsy or Roma women. In the ring drop, the usually attractive young woman appears to find a gold ring almost at the mark's feet. She asks him if he lost it, then insists on giving it to him since it's nobody's property and she wouldn't know what to do with the ring. All she asks in return is for a modest finder's fee (I don't know how much). The mark gives her some money as a reward for finding the ring and walks off as the happy new owner of a valuable gold jewelry, until some time later he has the ring appraised only to learn that it's only worth its weight in gold-colored tin. I had two women try this one on me today, and I waved them both off with the words "je connais ce truc (I know that trick)." I had seen it in action on a previous trip to Paris.

In the deaf scam, which was new to me today, an attractive young woman appears to be deaf and dumb and using signs asks the mark to sign a petition to promote a non-existent deaf organization. As the mark signs the petition and puts down his country (again the mark is almost always a man), he notices that there is a column to fill in the amount of the donation. Of course, then he feels obligated to fill in some sum and donate it to the deaf. I observed several of these young women animatedly chatting with each other when they were taking a break from running their scam. They all have perfect hearing, of course. This one was tried on me three times today.

My advice, when in Paris, don't sign anything, don't let anyone give you anything, and don't carry your wallet in your back pocket.

Tomorrow, more walking around Paris to toughen up the legs, if it doesn't rain.

Jack

Paris July 7, 2011

Last evening was not pleasant in the Strasbourg Youth Hostel on the Rhine. The hostel is in a beautiful location, and the evening started pleasantly enough. I was sitting outside at a table where I could watch the boats go up and down the Rhine through an opening in the trees when a Swiss gentleman asked me if he could join me. It turns out that he is a 78-year-old cyclist who was on his way on his touring bike from his home in Switzerland to Rotterdam. Apparently he tours all around Europe on his bike, staying at youth hostels. He also did the Camino de Santiago, but not on foot but rather on his bike starting again from his home in Switzerland. He and I chatted and drank beer for about an hour.

I went to bed at a decent hour, but all of us in the room were awakened around midnight by very loud music coming from the bar downstairs. The bass notes were deafening. Yes, in Europe, youth hostels have bars and sell booze to kids (there was also a condom dispenser in the hostel's men's room).

I was the only one willing to try to get the music turned down. First I went into the bar and got the brush off from the bartenders.It was hard communicating in French above music at an ear-splitting level, but I did understand enough to know that they weren't turning down the music.

The next attempt was the font desk manager, who phoned the bar and ordered the music lowered "un petit peu." I went back to the room, but the music stayed as load as before. I went back to the front desk, and this time the guy at the desk, who seemed to be in charge of that shift of employees went back to the bar in person, and that did the trick. I went back to a quiet room, and all of us went back to sleep.

Today I took the high-speed train, the "Train de Grande Vitesse (literally the train of great speed) or TGV from Strasbourg to Paris, a journey that took five hours the last time I made it, but now with the TGV in and rolling along at up to 150 miles per hour, the trip takes two hours and fifteen minutes. The TGV is very fast but not very comfortable. It bumps and rolls, in second class  you are cramped, and there is not enough room for the passengers' baggage. They cram as many people into that train as possible. However, getting there fast is sometimes worth a bit of discomfort.

It's cloudy and cool in Paris, and there was even a brief rain shower. I am not complaining, however. My sister E-mailed me that Phoenix was hit by a tremendous dust storm.

By the way, I'll be here three nights. Five days from now, I should be on the trail heading toward Santiago de Campostela.

July 6, 2011 Strasbourg

July 6, 2011 -- I spent most of today in the Rhine Park on both sides of the river. I didn't go into Strasbourg proper, although I have been there several times on previous trips to France.

There was an interesting collection of people in my dorm room last night: a Pole, a Brazilian, a Czech, a Frenchman, and I. The Frenchman and I spent an hour or so chatting. He was kind enough to forgive my primitive French, which he was kind enough to claim was better than his school English.

I did check out the way marker on the German side of the river, and there it was, a small statute of Saint James marking this section of the Way of Saint James, as we call it in English, or the Camino de Santiago, as it is called in Spanish. I learned from the marker that the German name is Jakobusweg. Saint Jake, as I'll call him, even bears the trademark of the pilgrimage, the image of a seashell.

Marker of the Way of Saint James (Jakobusweg in German) in Kehl, Germany across the Rhine from Strasbourg, France

Jack with Saint Jackobus (Saint James or Santiago)

There are traditional pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela from many places in Europe. I suppose if I were a real adventurer, I would start following the trail here instead of taking the train almost all the way to the Spanish border before starting my hike. I plan to spend five weeks on this adventure, but traditional pilgrims in the past spent months or even years walking to Santiago de Compostela and back.

Tomorrow, it's off to three nights in Paris. Then  I will head south to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to finally start my pilgrimage.

July 5, 2011 Strasbourg, France

6:20 p.m. --

July 5, 2011 -- 6:20 p.m. -- Strasbourg, France

As I mentioned in yesterday's entry, there were three of us in the dormitory at the youth hostel in Frankfurt. The Japanese guy was 63 years old, and we got along fine, but the teenager from Bulgaria was a real slob. He left his stuff spread over the floor, the two small writing tables, and the two chairs in our room. I picked everything up and threw it on his bed as a hint. However, he didn't come back until sometime in the night, took one look at all of his stuff in his bunk, and climbed into the spare bunk and went to sleep. He was still asleep when I left this morning.

I also ate supper with the Japanese guy yesterday. He wolfed down his food as if he hadn't eaten in a year, but yet he can only be described as skinny.

Today I took the train from Frankfurt to Kehl, Germany. One the first train, I sat with an American couple from Kansas and a teenaged German girl who had been a guest at their house as an exchange student. Now she was returning the favor by being their guide in Europe.

Kehl is just across the river from Strasbourg, France, and the Kehl train station is closer to the youth hostel where I am staying that the Strasbourg station is. I walked though Kehl lugging my backpack, and when I reached the Rhine River, I decided to sit down on a park bench in the shade and admire the view before crossing the footbridge into France. I had barely sat down when a cyclist happened by, saw the word "Arizona" on my T-shirt, and decided that he and I should have a chat. Why he assumed that some old man from Arizona could speak German, I don't know, but in this case he was correct.

The chat turned into one of these hour-long discussions in which we solved many of the world's problems., despite the fact that I had to pay close attention to understand his southern German accent. (I learned German in Hannover in the north, where only standard German is spoken, so I tend to have troubles with the regional accents of the south.)

According to him, there is a marker of one of the routes of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Campostela a few hundred meters upriver from where we were speaking. Now that I have gotten ride of my heavy backpack, I'm going to go back over and check it out and at the same time post this blog entry. I found an open WiFi connection on the German side of the footbridge.

I've only met one of my roommates here in Strasbourg. He is an exchange student from Brazil who is studying in Grenoble, the same place where I studied as an exchange student six years ago. His English is quite good. He tends to stumble over some of the vocabulary, but his accent could almost get him by as an American or Canadian.

The Fourth of July, 2011

9 a.m. German time -- The Fourth of July is not a holiday in Germany, of course, although in France some people will be celebrating American Independence Day out of gratitude for the US help in two world wars and in recognition that if it weren't for the French, the US wouldn't have won two wars for independence against the British. One doesn't sense the strong pro-American feelings in Germany that one finds among the middle-aged and older people in France. In fact, contrary to what many Americans believe, many Germans are anti-American while the French in general like us. The French feel we have a shared history as comrades in arms, whereas even in our War for Independence, German mercenaries (Prussians) were mostly on the other side.

I'm wearing an Arizona T-shirt today, which provoked  one German to ask me how the cattle in Arizona are doing. Somehow he felt that as a Phoenix resident I should have an intimate knowledge of cows. The German stereotype of Arizona is that it's a backward southern state full of cattle and rednecks. They're half wrong! They exaggerate the cattle part!

I walked around like a zombie all day yesterday as a result of a lack of sleep, but I slept like the dead during the night. I didn't even hear when my two roommates, a middle-aged Japanese man and a Bulgarian teenager, came home and got ready fro bed. I'm sure the kid rolled in a bit snockered and must have turned on the light and made a lot of noise. I'm in a four-person dormitory here with one of the beds free.

This morning I feel almost normal after four large mugs of coffee (it ended up being six) and an excellent German breakfast. I'm not a fan of German cooking, but German bread is the best in the world, and the cold cuts and cheese that go with breakfast are also excellent. The coffee is also very good, much better than Starbucks, which I suppose is setting the bar rather low.

I watched part of the team time trial, stage 2, of the Tour de France on TV yesterday, but I didn't see the final results. I'll glance at the morning newspaper for the race results before I head out sightseeing. More later.

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4:12 p.m. German Time -- I didn't do anything very exciting today. I walked, mostly along the Main River, which runs through the city. To a desert rat, it's refreshing to see a real river with real river traffic including barges, cruise boats, etc.

The weather was warmer today. According to my (probably inaccurate) pocket thermometer, the afternoon high almost reached 70 degrees, and there is not a cloud in the sky. Many people are still wearing sweaters and jackets, although my T-shirt felt fine today. In the park, most people were sitting in the sun, but I sought out the shade. I suppose that if you seldom see the sun, you feel that sitting in the sunshine is a good thing, which was fine with me, because I had my pick of shaded park benches.

I did not see today's Tour de France stage on TV, so I suppose I'll have to read the newspaper in the morning to find out who did what.

There are a lot of bicycle riders in Frankfurt, but they are mostly casual bicyclists. Almost no one wears a helmet. Although many of the streets have bike lanes, most people ignore  them and ride on the sidewalk, which gets to be annoying if you are a pedestrian. (Damn those bicycle riders!)  I've seen no one who seems to be a competitive cyclist or even willing to pedal hard enough to get the blood circulating. Even the few people in jerseys, cycling shorts, and cleats ride at a rather casual pace, and I've seen no one riding a pace line. Yesterday I saw two guys on time trial bikes dressed like racers out on the street mixing it up with car traffic while riding at perhaps 16 miles per hour. The normal cycling speed seems to be not much above a walking pace.

July 3, 2011 -- Frankfurt, Germany

I'm tired and I'm cold! I'm tired, because I didn't sleep much on the plane, despite the fact that I had a seat that opened up into a flat bed. I'm nodding off as I sit here at the computer, but I'm going to stay awake as long as possible this evening (it's only 2 p.m. now) to try to adapt myself to this time zone.

As to the cold, how could I have forgotten that the afternoon temperature in a German city can be down in the upper 50s even in July?

I arrived without problems at the Frankfurt airport, got through immigration and customs OK. Well, there actually was no one on duty in customs; we just all walked through. Then I took the commuter train into town and hiked from the railway station to the youth hostel where I'm staying with my backpack on my back. It was the first time that I carried the loaded backpack for any distance, and I wish now I had practiced with it more before I left Phoenix. My legs are killing me!

Well, I need to go upload this before I fall asleep here at the table. I discovered a free, open WiFi connection to the Internet just around the corner from the hostel. Walking to it will help keep me awake.

July 2, 2011 -- Greetings from 37,000 feet up

I'm writing my first journal entry from 37,000+ feet above Eastern Canada heading toward the Atlantic. I had quite a few air miles left over from when I used to work for an honest living, and I blew most of them on a first-class ticket on United Airlines. If you have never flown first-class on a transoceanic flight, you have no idea what first class can be. It's way above what passes for first class on domestic flights.

The first-class section of the plane, which has 12 "suites" (more like ample cubbyholes) has two flight attendants, and the section is only half full. If my grade-school math still works, that works out to a flight attendant for every three passengers. My seat opens out into a flat bed, and just as soon as a have a few more free drinks, I'm going to try to catch a few winks. It's only 8 p.m. in Arizona, but it's already 5 a.m. in Germany, and we land in five hours. There's plenty of room to stretch out and relax.

Since all I have been doing is eating, drinking, and reading, there's not much to talk about yet. I hope that this journal gets quite a bit more exciting as time goes on.

Jack

Pre-Trip Remarks

The blog entries below are old ones, made mainly when I was living in France several years ago. Beginning about July 4, 2011, I'll use this site to blog my hike to Santiago de Compostela in Northwestern Spain. - Jack Quinn

Overused Expressions

Anyone who reads the press or listens to political discussions on National Public Radio or watches news programs hears certain expressions over and over. Probably the most-overused expressions these days is “having said that” or “that said.” Some talking heads on television seem to use one of these two expressions every fourth or fifth sentence. What did people say before these overused expressions became the norm? They used the very serviceable word “however”. I would like to see the word “however” reintroduced into intelligent discussion.

In the semiconductor industry, an overused expression is “the food chain”, which means…. To tell you the truth, I’m not positive what it means, but I think it may be a hackneyed way of saying “hierarchy”.

“Comprises” and “is comprised of” are expressions that are often confused, although they have opposite meanings. I suggest the less-confusing alternatives “makes up” and “is made up of”, which writers are more likely to use correctly.

The expressions “I could care less” and “I couldn’t care less” also seem to have opposite meanings, but some speakers confuse them, saying “I could care less” when they don’t care at all. Why not just say “I don’t care”?

Well, the list of such expressions is long, and I’m sure that you have your favorites. I would like you to add them to the comments to this blog. -- Jack