Doing things the french way

This post is divided into two parts: What I have learned about life and travel in France, and what I have experienced doing triathlons in France. Each is rated as an upgrade or downgrade.

Travel Related:
1) Many cities have bikes that you can rent for short periods of time to ride around on. They are very cheap, and make life very convenient for getting around. It means you don't need to know the metro routes, and you see way more of the city than you would have otherwise.

There are stations all over Paris where you can park these.

2) Buy your tickets online. For museums and other attractions, at least in Paris, you can buy tickets online. There are two reasons to do this: you avoid the lines as there is usually a line for people who already have tickets, and frequently, you can buy tickets to multiple museums at once at a discount. You want to see the Musee de Rhodin and Musee d'Orsay? Combine them. There is an all Paris museum pass that you can buy and use over several days if you are staying for more than one or two days. I would recommend this; it is simply not possible to take in everything. I stayed 3 days in Paris, and I could have spent 10 looking at everything.

3) Travel by train and bus from city to city is pretty easy. For France, unfortunately they do not offer a Eurail one country pass (where you can buy a pass for a certain amount of access), but it is generally cheap and fast.

Life Related:

1) When you walk up to a group of people that you know, you greet each one individually. I went to dinner with a group from the tri team, and there were 14 of us. Whenever a new person walked up, a new round of greetings. It makes things entertaining before swimming with the team because it is a bunch of men and women in speedos exchanging the greetings for several minutes. I am not sure if this is an upgrade or downgrade.

2) Every guy gets a hand shake and a greeting (salut, ca va), every girl gets a kiss on each cheek, and little kids get one kiss on a cheek. I haven't figured out at what age the kids stop getting the one kiss.

3) If I lived in France, I would be obese, diabetic and have hypertension. Besides having nutella, they have this:

Yes- that is butter with sea salt- combining fat and salt into something delicious. You put on baguettes, which you can buy for usually less than one euro. With the family with whom I staying, we eat this after dinner with a type of cheese that I had never heard of before called camembert. Eat till you are full from dinner, then have a piece or two of baguette with the delicious butter or camembert. This is a definite upgrade.

4) You can buy giant things of cereal, like this:

For those of us that use pounds, that is almost three pounds of cereal.

You can't buy the normal cereals (cheerios, frosted mini wheats, etc), but you can buy cereals made by Nestle, which usually combine chocolate, caramel or nutella. They are delicious. Large cereal: upgrade. Not the usual choices? Downgrade.

5) Grocery stores are like Walmarts on crack. Walmart has everything, and generally low quality food. If you want to go buy a plasma tv, and risk getting some fresh produce, you can do that. But not at the grocery stores in France. You can get fresh produce that is of good quality, new pairs of socks, and that inflatable backyard pool you have had your eye on. You can also order your goods online, and then go to the store, and pick them up. It is awesome.

You think I am kidding? This is from the local supermarche's catalog. You can get your cat food, gaming system, and backyard pool all at once. This obviously doesn't show the quality of the food, but it is good.

Rating? Definite upgrade for the consumer, downgrade for the small business.

6) Milk is not refrigerated when you buy it. First of all, if you ever truly want to feel like a foreigner, walk around a grocery store in another country. While you may know a certain amount of the language, do you know how to say things like basil/potato/corn/paper towel? Probably not. I definitely struggled the first couple of times when I had to ask for help.

But back to milk: milk in France is UHT- ultra high temperature pasteurized, which means it doesn't have to be refrigerated until it is opened, and can stay on the shelf for a month. It looks like this:

I was a little skeptical the first time I bought it, but it tastes just the same, so I definitely think that this is an upgrade.

7) Dinner takes place after 8pm. This means I snack all afternoon on cereal, baguette, etc.

8) They love the Tour de France. It is on two tv channels, and on two different radio stations. For most Americans, they think the tour is booorrrrrring. In France, they listen to it. On the radio. While I thoroughly enjoy watching the tour, listening to it takes it to another level. Upgrade if you love the tour. 

9) You can get mayonnaise with your french fries, and ketchup with your fajitas, and this is normal. I don't understand why french people are not more obese. 

10) Cooking is based upon mass, not volume. You need two cups of flour? Well, get that much flour, you must know the density of flour. Fortunately, there are websites available to you that give the information you need.

11) Everybody smokes. Ok, not everybody, but a significantly higher percentage than in the US. and they smoke everywhere. While places are "smoke free", like some restaurants, the moment people step outside, they light up. People will walk to the door holding a cigarette. Also, you can buy bags of tobacco and roll your own; I saw someone doing this on the train from Rennes to Paris. 

Triathlon related:
1) Races are in the afternoon. Yes, they don't start until 2 or later in the afternoon. This means you don't have to wake up at 4:30 am to be at the race site by 5:30 am for the 7am start. Upgrade.

2) There are no age group awards. Awards are only handed out to the top 3/5/10 depending on the race. I don't know if this is an upgrade or downgrade, but it definitely speeds up the awards ceremony. They sometimes interview the podium too. It was a little awkward when I was asked about the race when I made the podium. "Uhh.... Je suis fatigue, et content. Merci."

3) Winners get good stuff- like money, gift certificates, or gear. In the races I have done, the race that I won, I got a 200 euro gift certificate to a sports store, and the race I placed 7th in, I got a bag full of overstim, the french equivalent of gu. Way better than a little plaque.

4) There are a lot of clubs. Almost every city has one, and they are populated with individuals of varying skill. Because there are clubs, there are club exclusive races, and team races. This makes things much more entertaining.

5) The races usually have the roads closed, and the races are looped. This makes the race safer, and means that races are much more spectator friendly.

6) Team races are awesome. I usually take any form of motivation I can get to race, but now I am racing for a team placing as well as individual placing, best time, etc, I push harder. It also means that the cheering is much more intense. While you may have some friends, family members or teammates out cheering for you at a race in the states, telling you to go faster, in France, they are yelling at you to pull back the competitors in front of you. While it is motivating to have a teammate tell you "Hey John you are the fifth placed girl!" (thanks Mike, and just FYI, I ended up only getting beaten by three professional women at that race), it is much more intense to have someone yelling "ALLEZ ALLEZ ALLEZ JOHN CATCH HIM".

7) Race photos are free. Free. Posted to the website, you can download at your leisure, not $24.99 for one download. Definite upgrade.

The butterfly eats butter with the monkey

Do you remember the first year(s) of learning a foreign language? The classes (at least for me) were in part filled with learning what I considered to be ridiculous vocabulary. In Spanish 2, I remember learning the vocabulary for penguin. Why. Just why. At what point in my travels to a foreign land would I need to know that? When would I need to say the butterfly eats butter with the monkey! What butterfly eats butter? And with a monkey? This is absurd! (And it may be one of the reasons why there is a high attrition rate in foreign language classes). This post is about my travels so far in France.

For the past several years, my parents have been encouraging me to take advantage of my profession and travel over the summer/breaks. Unfortunately, I have not done so, usually because I was working as a lifeguard to make some extra money, taking classes, moving, etc. I could always find an excuse to not go. This winter though, I was presented with an unusual opportunity that was presented to me by my triathlon coach Martin- go to France and stay with a family that does triathlons, and train, race, and travel. I jumped at the opportunity.

And then the planning started. I didn't speak a lick of french, so I downloaded an app on my phone called Duolingo. I worked out with Martin and the family that I am staying with the races that I could do, and did a fair amount of googling to check out others. I bought a bike box to pack up my bike, a plane ticket, and I thought I was set. A vacation combining everything that I enjoy? What else could be more perfect?

Then small problems started to present themselves before the trip started. At school, it was decided that my course load for the next year was going to change: for the 2013- 2014 school year, I taught regular chemistry (the same as the year before) and AP Biology. For the 2014-2015 year, I am to teach honors chemistry and anatomy and physiology. Problem number 1: I have never in my academic career taken an anatomy course. In college, I focused more on the micro side of biology and chemistry. So I found an online course through UC Berkeley Extension. I bought the book, and signed up for the course.

Problem number 2: I didn't own a bike box. With a gift from my uncle, I bought a bike box. Pack bike, travel with bike. I bought a Ruster Hen House, which promised that you would not get charged for having a piece of oversized luggage. I figured this would help save me money. My bike went from looking like this:

to looking like this:

and going in here:

With my bag packed, I could worry about other details.

Problem number 3: With Duolingo, I was learning what I considered to be some useless things. For example, the title of the blog: Le papillion mange du beurre avec le singe. Or sentences like this:

Thanks Duolingo. 

And finally getting to France. Working out the race details with my coach and the family with whom I was staying, there was a race that I could do the Sunday after I got out of school. I get out of school on a Thursday. That meant the following itinerary: School ends at 12:15 on Thursday. Go to airport, get on plane that leaves at 4:40pm, get to Paris at 4:00pm on Friday, get on bus at the airport to go to train station in Paris to take the 8pm train to get to Rennes (about 2 hours away by train), meet with family, build bike Saturday, race Sunday.

I planned out the end of the school year so that I could have everything graded in time, packed up everything (including Reese's cups and a pair of cycling shoes as was requested by the family), and headed to the airport. I checked my bags, and only had to pay for one bag (British Airways gives you one free bag, my bike was packed into a wheel bag and a frame bag in which I packed my textbooks and my clothes), and got aboard with the plan of passing out.

This happened within 5 minutes of getting on the plane.

As my seat buddy passed out on me, I realized that BA had some sweet movies in their seat back entertainment system. I haven't been to the theaters to see any of the major movies in a long time (besides the Lego movie with my sister, and if you haven't seen that movie, stop what you are doing and watch it now). Making a plan on what to watch, I made it through The Wolf of Wall Street, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and American Hustle. All awesome movies.

After landing in Paris with a quick stop in London, I made my way to baggage claim to pick up my wheels and bike. My plane landed at 4, my train wasn't until 8, so I figured I would have time to take the bus into the city, get dinner, and hop on the train. As the bags came out, I became more and more nervous. My stuff wasn't there. And then, the final bag was my wheel bag. Nothing else showed up.

I grabbed my wheel bag, and walked over to the well staffed baggage table, and asked where the oversize luggage was, on the odds that the bag with my frame would be there. I was pointed in that direction, and walked over; my bag was not there. I walked back, asked if that was all the luggage, was informed that it was, and then told them that my bag was missing.

Going through the standard exchange at the baggage table (giving name, flight details, etc), I was informed that my bags were on the plane to Paris (good to know), but they didn't know where my bag was. Confused, I asked again-my bags were on the plane, in Paris, but somehow missing? Yes. I filled out the appropriate paperwork to let British Airways know that they had lost my bike, and then I decided to wait at the airport for the next two flights to come in to see if my frame bag would show up, hoping that it was placed to the side, and would eventually make its way up from the underbelly of the airport.

No such luck, so I took my wheel bag and backpack to the bus stop that would take me to the train station in Paris. When I got to the bus stop, I was greeted with this:

The train workers were on strike (Gare means station in French), and my train was cancelled. Seeing as some of the trains were still running, I hopped on the bus, hoping that I could get on one that was going in the right direction.

With the delay in getting my luggage, and the incredible amount of traffic in Paris due to the train strike (it took 2.5 hours to get from the airport to the train station, a trip that normally takes an hour), my plan of getting dinner in Paris was nixed, so I wandered through the train station, until I found someone who looked official, and asked for help. He let me know that I could get on a train that was leaving an hour later, it didn't matter that my ticket was for the earlier train, just put my butt in a spot on the train.

I got on the train, and two hours later, I was met in Rennes by Virginie and her husband Ruben. I was relieved, and exhausted. 

The next day, with Ruben and Virginie's help, we found out that bike had been found, and that British Airways would put the bike on a flight to the local airport, and I could get it Sunday morning. While that sounded grand, Virginie didn't trust it, and we went to meet the president of the triathlon team that I would be racing with, Rennes Triathlon. They had an extra bike I could use, and they also gave me a team shirt, jersey, and a kit to use during races. I was incredibly grateful. 

Sunday came and went, my bike didn't show up (a separate blog post on the bike, British Airways, and the bike bag), so I raced Sunday. The races I have done will get their own blog post shortly.

The beginning of the trip was a mess. But I am in France, with an awesome family and team, and things are good.