Thursday, 4 August, 2022 – E spent the day on the train, getting to Paris. He said he is looking forward to getting to Arles and being able to stay in one place for several days. He has been traveling alone now for over a week; all together, he will have travelled alone for 13 days by the time he gets to the farm in Arles.
He had a really short transfer today and missed one of his connections, despite sprinting half a mile from one end of the station to another. He lost his Thermos. He had to find a laundromat in Paris because he was out of clean underwear. He misses his friends.
None of which takes away from this: He is in freaking PARIS!!! Amazing! Hurray!
But, he’s tired and needs a little downtime from the tourist thing, I think, maybe just for a day. His hostel is in the 10th Arrondissement; it is run by the same company where he stayed in Amsterdam, I think: https://staygenerator.com/hostels/paris He could stay within a one block radius of the hostel and have a great day exploring.
Over What’sApp, I told him a little about traveling to Qingdao, alone and spending over a week there. I never wanted to admit to anyone how hard that trip was. I had planned to meet up in Beijing with a friend from my Master’s program in Hawai’i but the flooding around Shanghai was so bad, the trains could not run. The rest of the theater group I was traveling with had gone home or were traveling elsewhere, and my plane did not leave for another two weeks.
So, I took a boat (the only mode of transportation that seemed safe) to a place I just picked out on the map, far away from the floods. I was never fluent in Chinese so I spent a lot of time reading. There was no Internet or cell phone or YouTube. TV was Chinese TV. In Qingdao, I met a few people who spoke English better than I spoke Chinese but they were not meaningful or lengthy exchanges. Anyway, all that to explain E is doing better than I did but it is still hard to spend so much time alone.
I think of myself as an introvert and fairly solitary but that time in Qingdao showed me the limits of solitariness. Turns out, I do need interaction with people!
It is Thursday night in Paris. E will be at the farm by Monday.