Parapoetica

I recently got back from my first trip ever outside the United States, not counting Club Med or Canada. (I know, it’s embarrassing. We got kinda busy creating that Internet thing, okay?)

Aside from my general dumbfounded “Wow! There’s a whole planet out there!” discovery, here are some things I learned:

• Everybody in Europe smokes. Indoors. Even people who rent non-smoking rooms (in the rare cases they exist) smoke in the rooms.

• Balisto bars are like what Twix should have been. Imagine a Twix made with wheat flour and including raisins and hazelnut. Yum. They’re almost healthy.

• Fondue in France is like fondue in America. But that’s because they have something better: raclette. It’s like fondue with a better UI. Take cheese (usually raclette cheese, of course), melt it on a non-stick tray with a handle, and scrape it off with a wooden scraper onto your potatoes, bread, or what have you. Yum. It IS healthy.

• Brides-les-Bains is a “spa town” with a “thermal bath”. In America, that would mean hot springs and luxurious massages. In France, it means 20-minute lackluster rubdowns on a latex sheet under running water, and a “tepid spring” of 32{*} C – that’s 89{*} F. Oh, and you need to make an appointment in advance to get into the bath. Oh, and you need a doctor’s prescription, because the bath is a medical device.

• The French health ministry requires that you wear footwear at all times near a pool, tepid tub, etc. to prevent catching any waterborne diseases on your bare feet. However, dogs in restaurants are A-OK.

• The Alps at the edge of a city are stunning, no matter how many times you look up at them. And past every breathtaking view is another that’s even better.

• But they’re really tall. Don’t fall.

• Despite its French name, and the “Liqueur Royale de France” moniker, Chambord is difficult to find in France, and our ex-pat tour guide said he hadn’t seen anyone drink it in his four years there. (Then again, he wasn’t very reliable. He sent us to the spa town.)

• Apparently, they don’t have Au Bon Pain, La Madeleine, or “Le Menu” either. They do have Evian.

• The Swiss have really neat gadgets everywhere, like an automatic slot for your hotel card key, so that when you leave the room, the lights go out, and when you come back, they go back on in the same configuration, or cool fiber-optic lighting displays. Their trains are comfortable whisper-silent.

• But they can’t make a “walk” button for their traffic lights that actually lets you know when you’ve pressed it.

• It is possible to pick out an American accent in a crowd, even when you can’t actually hear what the person is saying.

• The French do not send their crack forensic-science detectives to the Gendarmarie at Courchevel 1850. They send polite young men who refuse, on grounds of security, to give you a copy of the police report they have just taken.

• John Williams sings and plays guitar in the bars of various French tourist hotels. Avoid him. He has good intonation, and half-decent guitar chops, but he has only one vocal style: lounge-with-a-slight-original-artist-impersonation. He does not sing songs; he sings the words to songs.

• But if you must see him, don’t miss his sparkling acoustic lounge rendition of Guns ‘n’ Roses’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine”. I only wish I could have recorded it.

• If we assume that Swiss citizens move their legs at the same rate as Americans when walking, and that they have the same leg-to-torso ratio, we can deduce from their pedestrian-signal timing that the average Swiss citizen is 18.3 meters tall.

• Geneva’s Promenade-du-Lac is a beautiful place to walk on a warm afternoon, with its 140-meter fountain and its flower clock. Sadly, it is overrun with overprimped pre-teens on roller skates. Not blades. Four-wheeled skates. And when I say overprimped, I mean “dressed like Madonna on tour in the 80s”.

I don’t usually blog about my personal life, or, frankly, create much original content or opinion at all; this has been more of a site for collecting interesting things that I’ve seen elsewhere, sort of a central “Hey! Did you see? Did you know?” resource to supplant those annoying mass-mailings all your friends do.

But a single snippy interjection from a woman I’ll call “Josie” at the end of my plane ride – interrupting a congenial conversation I was having with a fellow traveler – really threatened to spoil my evening, and I just don’t feel like letting it pass. It’s not that it really bothered me; I shook it off after a few minutes. What really bothered me was my inability at the time to articulate what a rude, obnoxious woman she was; it wasn’t until later that night that the words really came to me. And they’re going to stick in my head until I write them down.

I’d initially vowed to write a venomous, snide entry here, publish the woman’s full name and e-mail address, and thereby make my editorial garrotting the top Google search result for Josie’s name, while simultaneously making her the target of every spambot that comes to call.

I’ve decided I have more class than that. But not more class than this.

Josie: I may, in fact, be too talkative sometimes, because my brain moves faster than my mouth. And I may be too energetic, even hyper, because my head imagines more endeavours than I can enact. I’ll even concede that these flaws and foibles can be annoying. But even at my most irritating moments, the people around me know that I’m kind-hearted, and thoughtful, and sensitive to others. And they respect me for that.

You’re sort of my opposite. You’re no spring chicken, but you still live life loud and with gusto. You’re apparently a blast to go drinking with, quick with the wisecracks, and a ready source of gossip and opinion at the table. Like a rock star on a reunion tour, you come with an entourage and a make-up kit. But your most enthusastic devotee is a middle-aged man who rooms with his mother and worries about blacks in his neighborhood. And some of the others seem to find you entertaining, if not necessarily admirable. As for the rest of our party? Best I can tell, they genuinely dislike you.

One of my cats, now halfway through his little life, still thinks he’s the vicious tiger he never was as a kitten. He’ll grab a toy with his teeth and growl at it. But despite the show of force, the most damage he can do is to push it across the room. He’s harmless. He just doesn’t know it.

You kind of remind me of him.