07/08 16:32 Train to
Rennes
Distance biked since last checked: 109 km (45 km Friday, 7
km Saturday, 30 km Sunday, 27 km Tuesday)
Today marks my first directly eastward journey on the trip.
The meaning is clear: I’m almost home.
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| A portside Rozd in Brest |
When it comes to traveling, I find the back half of a trip
or the last few days more relaxing. With the return home closer, I feel less
bad about thinking ahead to arrival and forgetting to enjoy today.
Paradoxically, I find it easier to focus on the trip at hand when there’s less
of it to think about. My last two days are all but planned, I have only one
more bike ride in front of me, and no tight time constraints except to get up
on time for my train home Thursday. This sense of comfort with endings contrasts
with how I enjoy books. In reading a good book, my favorite moment is the
halfway mark, when I know there’s as much joy ahead of me as that I’ve already
uncovered. After that, bittersweetness fills a reading that I know too soon
will end, even as desire to finish compels me to continue without undue delay.
Perhaps the physical effort that goes into traveling and the mental effort
required to plan and manage the trip blunts that bittersweetness, or maybe for
all my supposed adventurousness I am just a boring homebody who would be happy
reading, writing, and eating peanut butter all day without leaving the house.
One can rule nothing out.
In any case, I am on my way home, with room for one last big
detour. My trip as realized fell reasonably far from the details I imagined,
even as of two days ago. The structure of plans and reality matched, mostly.:
head west on the southern shore of Bretagne, then loop back east on the
Northern side, but instead of going to a festival on a peninsula that would
have required a 40 km bike trip each way with no sure thing on tickets or
lodging, I went to Lorient and the FIL for a couple hours; instead of working
my way through the northern shore of Bretagne over 2-3 days, I took a train to
Dol-de-Bretagne, whence I will make my one stop tomorrow; instead of visiting
St. Malo I stayed two nights on l’île d’Ouessant (I realized only in the Rennes train station I
could have just as easily stayed in St. Malo tonight. Ah well, save something
for next time).
Anyway, I’m happy with how this has turned out. And now for
a few anecdotes about people I’ve met or seen along the way.
I’ve spent more time in bars on this trip than I might
usually. Actually, in Europe there are few cafes as we Americans think of them,
ala the local coffee shop or Starbucks. Of course there are Starbucks, but not
many. Otherwise, when waiting for a train, a travel partner, or a muse to roll
on through, I’m sitting in a bar cum salon de thé cum brasserie.
(The one main exception I can think of: Ghent, Belgium,
where they have cupcake shops. It should come as no shock that I like Ghent).
In Auray, a town of little note for me except its position
on two train lines, I had a beer and waited for my train to Lorient. Behind the
bad a woman with chestnut-brown hair and the wrinkles of the late 40s worked. A
man with a large backpack, a large dog, and both a grizzled voice and a
grizzled face stood at the bar and had a drink. A couple of old men sat at the
right of the bar. A couple of not quite as old women sat at a table to the
left. I sat at a table in the middle, against the wall facing the bar. Across
perched on a stool a girl with short dark hair and a turquoise shirt, cute,
more or less my age.
In to the bar came two men who sidled up next to the girl.
The one, older, bigger, with a bandana over his hair, exchanged kisses with
her. The other, wiry build and wired energy, talked with the barmaid about what
beers were available. His choices were not. His voice rose. He said something
choice to either the girl or the barmaid. His companion asked him to go wait
outside. This appeared to be a ritual for the duo.
The older of the two men continued to talk with the girl,
standing. The other recurred at the door, anger still on his breath and voice.
His only pause was to love up on the dog. The dog, at least, did not get upset
at him. The rest of us continued our activities as if all was well. The train
of life approached.
The man made a last sally to the bar. The diatribe renewed
in his tongue, he uttered a choice word at the barmaid (I missed it). A man
working at the bar appeared, furious, yelled at the man, it was about time to
stop talking and start punching.
Calmer heads prevailed. The older man banished his companion
again. The barman cooled off. I caught the eye of the barmaid, drying a glass
and shaking her head. “He was looking for it,” she said.
In a bar on Ouessant, a similar tale. I sat at the bar and drank a Belle Kriek beer
(cherry, Belgian), reading my Polish book and watching the TV, the latter more
successfully. Around the curve of the bar to my right, a local drunk stood. A
green sweatshirt, shorts, thin graying hair, and a half-conscious, eerie smile
on his lips. A box of Kinder Bueno bars rested on the bar next to him. A couple
of kids came into the bar, about 14 years old, asking for fruit drinks
(earlier, walking, I heard the boys bragging about all this alcohol they had on
them – vodka, whisky, etc.). The drunk tut-tutted them but with no authority,
unheeded. Instead, he tried offering everyone within reach a candy – me, the
kids, and so on. Also to no avail.
Another man joined the first at the bar. This had wild gray
hair and a stubbled, attractive face. His yes held a spark and his look was, as
yet, sober. He ordered a drink and fell into banter with the first man. The two
rearranged chairs in the room, possibly with intentions of emulating the 3000
meter steeplechase shown on the screen behind them but most likely out of the
first’s impetuous inebriation). The second joined in the Kinder Bueno game,
buying one and putting it on his tab – he had a golden credit card with a
company name on it. Again, I turned down an offered candy bar.
The energy finally went sour as the bar staff decided the
first had to step outside (they may have picked up on the annoyed looks from me
and others at the bar). The second, after asking if he too had to leave and
hearing he didn’t, turned his liberated attention elsewhere. He was impressed
with my Kriek beer and asked, several times, for the name so he could order
one. He asked me about my reading before backing off when he either heard my
French or decided he might disturb me. After I moved to a table (in part to
avoid the first drunk) he again pointed to my book or my beer and offered to
buy me another, flashing his credit card. “Vous êtes très gentil,” I told him,
“but I’m leaving after the race.”
Outside, a yell and a tumbling piece of furniture clattered
among the din. One of the hotel/bar staff ran outside. A few bar patrons
joined. I did not go and rubberneck. The second stayed at the bar, craning his
neck towards the door and perhaps finding his beer a little sweeter. A man with
a notepad entered a few minutes later.
Usain Bolt won the race, of course. I stepped out, thinking
of humanity’s highs and lows.
Outside of the bar, the train is a good place to catch sight
of our curious habits. On one train, from Lorient to Quimper, I sat in the
entry area with my bike. Across the entry way, a white-haired woman sat next to
the bathroom. Perhaps an inappropriate place.
A man in the car behind her came to use the bathroom. He was
bald and dressed in a Picasso-striped shirt. He tried the bathroom door. It
didn’t give. Once or twice more he tried before leaving, perplexed. The woman
said nothing.
A minute later a man left the bathroom; I had not been sure
someone was in there. A minute later, a young woman staggered into the
bathroom, looking not all there. Our striped-shirt man tried the door again
another minute after, again with no luck. He tried once more, then looked at
the woman. Only then did she tell him the bathroom was occupied.
Passons…
the man, without ever changing his strategy by actually waiting for the
bathroom, finally got in. A young woman tried the door, found it locked, and
waited. The man left. She entered, did her bit, and exited. She left the door
half-open. The woman, not one to speak, stared at the girl with annoyance for a
few seconds, then rose from her seat and shut the door.
On a different train, from Brest to Rennes, a man struck up
a conversation with me about my bike. As with Jeff, it was another of those
French-English foreign conversations. This man congratulated me on my journey.
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| The Picture I took |
In between trains in Quimper, before stopping in the African
bar, I walked around looking for an internet café (I traveled on this trip like
it was 2005). As I crossed over a bridge a couple blocks from the train
station, I stopped to take a picture. A black man with dreads approached me and
asked if I was Italian. He had a few teeth missing and a beer in his hand (it
was a little after noon). My answer that I was American excited him. He told me
he was from South Africa, where the last World Cup was, did I go? My negative
response did not dissuade him from giving me a big handshake as we parted.
Before capping this ramble, I’d like to mention something
about crêperies that
I’ve observed after eating crepes an average of once a day since arriving in
Bretagne. That is: one cannot order two crepes at once. The waiters worry that
either the second crepe or your appetite will cool off too much for it to be
worth it. So one crepe at a time does one progress through one’s meal. Also,
when one switches from salty, buckwheat crepes (known as galettes) to sweet
white flour dessert crepes, the wait staff changes one’s silverware. This does
not (usually) happen going from galette to galette. This makes sense but still
amuses me.
On Sunday, I rode my bike to Le Conquet from Brest to catch
the ferry to Ouessant. Many dark clouds blew over the city, and the sky was
clear enough in its cloudy way that one could see the wind at work. Having a
fair amount of time to make my boat, and still tense from the night prior (of
the Aching Jaw), I decided to wait out the rain when I could (I avoided the two
bigger of the three rainclouds that passed over my head).
It was while waiting out the first, still in Brest, perched
under a bus stop with my legs folded under to evade the windblown drops, that a
woman joined. She had gray-brown hair to match a gray suit, and a faint blond
mustache that was all the same quite visible, and in 15 minutes or so, she told
me much about her life.
She has a cousin in the Bay Area who she learned about well
into adulthood; the cousin’s father left France before the war and, despite
aiding the war effort in the U.S., would have been tried as a deserter if he
returned. She lived in interior Bretagne before moving to Brest when she was
young and the city not yet rebuilt from the war. She finds native Brest folk
(Brestians?) standoffish and unhelpful, making it two people I met who moved to
another place in Bretagne and disliked the locals. She similarly dislikes
people from Luxembourg and that part of Germany, finding them cold, unlike
Germans from Munich. She also dislikes Russians and their difficult literature.
I learned that Mongols fought for Napoleon and then stayed in
France after the war, helping to build the Nantes-Brest canal. This woman had
Scottish and, she thought, Mongol blood in her. Almost every time she made a
reference to Mongols, she pulled her eyes thin.
Such are the people I’ve met and the interactions I’ve seen
on this trip.
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