Oh yeah, about France

So our attempt at visiting France ended up a little differently than we anticipated.

On Friday afternoon we took a train to the London Waterloo station (seen the Bourne Ultimatum? yeah, it's that station), got off and switched trains to go to Dover (yeah, like the white cliffs of Dover). From Dover, the plan was to take the next ferry over to Calais, spend the night in a hotel in Calais we'd reserved, then have most of the day Saturday to explore Calais and the surrounding area. Unfortunately, weather was quite miserable and the ferry was delayed by an hour. And then another hour. And another. And another. The four of us sat at a table in the Port of Dover for the better part of four hours, until eventually the news reached us that at the earliest we'd land in the Port of Calais at about 12:20 am. Ugh. All of us, thinking quite maturely and carefully, decided we'd rather not show up in a foreign country in the middle of the night and try to find our hotel in the dark, so we got directions to a cheap, clean nearby hotel and stayed there for the night. We got there at 11 pm, right as the hotel restaurant stopped serving food, but we found out that we could order Indian food to be delivered (amazing news). Let it be known that that was the first Indian food I'd dared to order since my stay in India, and it didn't even make me nauseous (I will admit, the first time I smelled it I had a little flashback of puking in a dirty bathroom in Chennai, but it only lasted for a moment). I got two orders of delicious naan bread which I had missed so much. Mmm lovely.

Anyways, the next morning, after squeezing the four of us into two twin beds pushed together, we packed up and walked back to that infamous Port of Dover that we had spent so much lovely time the night before. By the time we could board, go through security, wait for everyone to load their cars onto the ferry, cross the channel, unload, go through security again, wait for the bus from the port to the city, and then ride the bus to the city center, it was already early afternoon in Calais, France. The ferry ride was pretty cool though, I'll admit--we got some awesome pictures of the white cliffs which I'll add later.

We had to be pack at the port in a few hours, so we didn't really have time to leave Calais, and much to our disappointment, Calais is kind of a shady city, to be honest. We found a cute little cafe/bar thing and had some delicious onion soup and bread, but the whole culture clash thing was a little awkward. It was pretty obvious that we were tourists, with our backpacks and everything, and then we spoke mostly English (Karen spoke some good French) made us even more uncomfortable and stared at. After the cafe, we walked around a bit, found a cute bakery and bought a cute little pastry each, found a wine and cheese shop and bought a bottle of cheap French wine, then walked around the city for a bit, looking for a place to sit. The only benches we could find were the bus stop and two in a really shady section of town, which we promptly left. We then spotted an "Irish" pub and, figuring that was our best bet, wandered back inside. We spent the rest of our time in Calais in the pub talking, enjoying some drinks and hot chocolate and eating our pastry, laughing about the weekend and deciding to leave Calais a bit earlier and get the next available ferry back to Dover. Oh man, what great tourists we made.

So all in all, it was actually a quite hilarious weekend--one of those this-will-make-such-a-great-story-later-but-is-kind-of-annoying-now weekends. We got back into Winchester at 12:30 am that night, and I slept all the way to 11 am Sunday. Hey, either way, it is still pretty sweet to say I went to France. =)