Jessica Rowan

Nancy doesn’t really have much to see, but the one place in town is definitely worth the trip.

From Nancy, I took the TGV train to Paris. It was three hours long and I got to sit in first class. Surprisingly, first class isn’t much different than second class. It’s just a lot of older people who think they’re better than everyone else. During the entire three-hour ride; I got to watch a woman who was in her mid-50’s use her tweezers and a small mirror to pluck out her beard. I tried to ignore her but after a while it just turned my stomach. Luckily half way through the trip, a man in his sixties sat down across from me (in French morning trains, there are assigned seats,) and started talking to me. He thought I was German, but I corrected him and we had a two-hour conversation about French-US relations. Just before arriving in Paris, he pulled out some paperwork to look over. He was an official of the French Army. I’m glad I didn’t say anything about American policy.

In Paris, I had to walk a few blocks in order to get to the RER – a train – to get to Charles de Gaulle airport. The RER took about 30 minutes to get to the airport. It was about 30 minutes in hell. The train was hot; it smelled; and people seemed outright rude. I was traveling through the suburbs of Paris. All the places that are now in the news. I finally got to the airport. Checked in my stuff and waited for boarding. My plane boarded but could not take off on time because a woman refused to sit down because a man kept kicking her seat. From that point on, I knew that the plane ride wasn’t going to be easy. My television did not work for about 2 hours out of the eight. All it did was blink from black to white repeatedly. It wouldn’t even turn off. I thought I was going crazy. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one. So they fixed the problem : ) I finally landed in JFK around 10 pm on Thursday night. There were no available parking areas for the plane so we taxied around the airport for what seemed like forever. I went through custom and everything fine. My dad picked me up and we went home. It took forever to get home, thanks to construction and closed bridges, but it was good to be home.

During the entire trip, I had Coheed on my MP3 player. The lyrics that repeatedly were in my head were from The Willing Well II: Fear through the eyes of Madness.: (of course I took them out of context)

So I have a secret that no one should know that I shouldn’t tell - Oh boy, I'm eating my way back home.