Saturday, 29 October, 2022 – Okay, I messed up my timing again: today – Saturday – was Elias’s last day in Lyon. I miss one day and I get turned around! It is 5am in France right now so he’s asleep but will be getting up to take the train to Paris on Sunday morning.
If he takes the high-speed train, apparently he can get from Lyon to somewhere in Paris in two hours. I say “somewhere” because I tried to find a ticket, just to see the number of stations and the schedules and depending on the station I select in Paris, I cannot get a ticket until Monday. This seems odd to me. Are there so few trains? Or so few trains going to certain parts of Paris? I am probably not reading the schedule correctly.
This is a map I found of the TGV Train route. I assume Elias was able to get a ticket on this train but of course, I don’t know.
I really had no idea that scheduling trains and making reservations for accommodations would take so much effort and coordination on Elias’s part. I think he must have gotten the hang of it because he has not mentioned anything about missing his connections since September. I would like to think I would get the hang of it too, if I were in his position but I also get mixed up trying to figure out when the next bus is coming. (Side note: I had been taking the city bus to the Fed, until the pandemic. Kansas City is putting in light rail which has disrupted the bus routes near the Federal Reserve Bank so I have to drive. When I drive. Which is not often, for now.)
I think Elias also has the hang of the 24-hour clock. There is something about the logic of it that appeals to him. He also has the hang of the date order that puts day before month before year. I wonder if I have some sort of number dyslexia because I have to think every single time I see a date written in this format “10/12/2022” and remind myself that it means the 12th of October, not the 10th of December. Everyone else in the world would say it means the 10th of December! I am technically in the majority. (Right? Is there somewhere else they put the month first?) I remember being in Hong Kong and thinking, “Finally! Why don’t we do this at home!?”
It will be fun to hear what Elias finds idiotic in the United States after so much time away. I felt very American in East Asia, and generally proud of that. Things like dates and times were among the things I felt pretty silly about – why Americans do not use metric measurements, for example – trying to explain to people why we don’t use the standards everyone else does. What I usually got in response was, “Well, that is very American, isn’t it?”