Paris

Excerpt from an email from Malka:

... I know that's not why you're REALLY going to Paris. Yeah I figured it out.

You're on the run from an international conspiracy of evil meat company executives. They've gotten wind of your upcoming "Worldwide Guide to Fake Meats and Where to Find Them" and they know it will take the world by storm and ruin their profits forever and force them to abandon their lives of decadent luxury.

So now they've sent their minions and ruthless assassins after you, with instructions to stop you at any cost. To hide your tracks you've been changing itineraries every 10 seconds, buying lots of extra tickets and enrolling in schools which are actually full just to throw them off the scent. Like right now, there's a whole pack of minions and ruthless assassins wandering around the Budapest train station wondering where you went.

It helps that you've become a master of disguise with your brand new tan but I think you should also wear a new wig in every country, and possibly sometimes a fake mustache. Also, they are probably following the smell of delicious tofurkey, but I learned from movies that if you wade through a stream they'll lose the trail.

So great news for the ruthless minions: it looks like I'm using my ticket to Paris after all. I just called the school and an extremely nice person in the school's office informed me that there is in fact a space for me in the class on Monday but they don't have any available housing on such short notice so I'll have to find my own place to stay for a few nights and then they'll assign me to a host family.

Following a search that was both exhaustive and exhausting, I have come to the conclusion that there is not a single available bed tomorrow night for under $90 in all of Paris. No good.

What I'd really like is to find a flat for the month so that I don't have to live with a host family (that seems so invasive and weird to me although it would probably be good for my non-existent French). I'll keep looking and if anyone has any suggestions for websites to search, let me know. I've already tried craigslist and google searches for "cheap vacation rentals Paris" and that sort of thing.

So here's my itinerary tomorrow: I'm taking a train to Breclav (evil, evil Breclav) at about seven in the morning and then sitting around the Breclav train station (evil, evil Breclav train station) for approximately a billion hours and then I'm taking another train to Bratislava where I have approximately three seconds to change my Czech crowns into Slovakian money, grab a taxi or a bus, and check in for my flight to Paris. My flight gets in to Paris at about 20.00 and then I have to figure out how to get to my (non-existent) hotel.

Wish me luck.

I spent yesterday hanging out with a girl from the UP (go team Midwest!) and a woman from Madrid. I spent probably five or six hours with the girl from the UP (that's the upper peninsula of Michigan for those out of the loop) and it wasn't until after she left Olomouc this morning that I realized that I never got her name.


(from the kitchen window of my hostel)

You should be impressed with me, by the way. I accomplished the nearly impossible today: I shipped a package from a foreign post office. If you've never attempted such a feat, I recommend against it. It's not that the post office is poorly run, it's just that nothing is in English. Anyway, I spent $23 to send home a thoroughly useless package of things that I'll never need again. I hate throwing good money after bad but I'm usually pretty good at throwing the bad money the first time around.

Speaking of throwing money, I'm heading back to Western Europe tomorrow. How about that?