Wednesday, 26 October, 2022 – I had a long, wonderful conversation with Elias today. The short version is: he is fine and he made it to Lyon and found a place to stay.
The longer version is, unfortunately, my fears were realized: he’s in a dump. As he said, it is like the place he stayed one night with Ian and Kelsey after the Nanterre debacle. “It’s like a Motel 6. There are two ashtrays in the room, even though it is supposed to be a nonsmoking room.” The wifi is so crappy, he is using the wifi of the next nearest hotel. Even with the nice veneer that Google street map pictures lend to the location, you can see how Elias might be reminded of Motel 6.
Also, because the train arrived later in the evening in Dardilly, there was no place to buy food. So Elias had a bag of peanuts and some cookies for dinner. Yum!
Yes, Dardilly. A suburb so far outside Lyon, it has its own address. Nothing against suburbs, generally speaking, but the reason people move to them is to get away from city life that includes restaurants, markets and bars that stay open late and are within easy walking distance of public transportation. In order to get into Lyon, Elias will need to take a bus and then a train. I mapped it, just to be able to visualize it.
I paint a less than rosy picture of the next three days he will spend in Dardilly, because well, it is not ideal. Yet, as I said, Elias is fine. When I talked to him, he was hungry and tired, but hopefully tomorrow, he will find food and some sort of diversion. I expect he will make the trek into Lyon more than once. It just would be nice to be a little closer than 40 minutes away by bus and train.
We laughed about it, actually. I could not help laughing at the irony of his landing in a Motel 6 in the last week of his trip to Europe. So glamorous! How exciting! You spent a whole three months in Europe! Well, the truth is that while much of it was interesting, part of it was exciting, and sometimes a little glamorous, Europe is also a place where people live, just like people live in Prairie Village, Kansas and Beckley, West Virginia, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. All of which have Motel 6s, underwhelming, each and every one of them.
I was thinking about it later, after we had talked, and Elias really has had a full travel experience, full enough that he can find the mundane, tedious, and annoying in daily life in France or Italy. Those places are not exotic anymore, and I think there’s value in that experience, too. Elias was saying that he’s really looking forward to being back in Paris because it feels familiar. He said, “Paris is easy!” Meaning, it an easy place to get around, since he knows neighborhoods, restaurants, train routes, and hostels to stay in – or avoid. That sense of intimidation and awareness of the magnitude of the city has faded. I mean, it is Paris so it is beautiful and amazing, but it is also a place where ordinary people live out their whole lives, only occasionally (if ever) in awe of the beauty of it.
I remember getting to the point in Hong Kong when I did not take note of certain things with a sense of wonder or curiosity. I stopped going into the tiny, family markets to shop and thinking, “Wow. This place is so small! How do they get so much stuff into such a small space?” Does that mean I stopped learning new things about life in Hong Kong and Chinese culture? I am not sure. I remember going into a supermarket in the U.S. the first time I got back and thinking, “This place is HUGE! I can’t believe I have 15 different shampoos to choose from. How am I going to decide?” I was so overwhelmed, I walked out.
I am blathering now. I don’t have a good ending to this post. Except to say that Elias is doing wonderfully, amazingly well in his last week in Europe, Motel 6 and all.