I Am Home....but Just Barely.

Friday was my last day in Pau. I met some French friends for lunch, then finished my suitcases and had my host grandfather (?) take me to the train station. I pretty much stared at the countryside for five hours, which was very relaxing, until it got dark and I drank too much water and peed fourteen times in two hours. Oh, biology. 

Getting on the train with ally my luggage was hard enough. My host grandpa helped me out with it while I was in Pau, then took a flying leap off the train like some kind of incredible (-y old superhero, Geriatric Man to the rescue!) But it was the getting off the train that nearly robbed me of my life. Not to mention my luggage. I won't even go into the details, I will just tell you that it was grisly and scarring and I vow, from this day forward, to only ever pack one wheeled suitcase chock-full of air and marshmallows.

My good friend Taz was waiting for us in the train station when we arrived, which made all of us happy, which gave us an ounce more energy to haul our bags down three barred escalators, several flights of stairs, then up several more flights of stairs, into the Métro, off of the Métro, back up stairs, down the street, and up more stairs to his apartment building. Without that, however, we'd have had to haul them with us all night. 

And do you know what we did all night?

We walked. We walked all over Paris. It was magnificent. The Christmas lights, the people out running at 5 a.m., the "open late" couscous restaurants, the shadow of the Eiffel Tower against the orange haze of sodium streetlamps. It really was spectacular. We spent the entire night, until 8 a.m. Friday, in the streets of Paris. Then, we took a cab to the airport, said goodbye to Taz, and checked in to our airlines. 

This is when the trouble began. While I was still at my host parents' house, I had packed and weighed all my bags. My tiny suitcase was underweight, but my larger one was tipping the scales at 22 kilos, which is exactly the limit. I was going to attempt to smuggle some cheese through customs in Washington, though, so I needed the suitcase to be lighter. I took out a bunch of stuff--socks, underwear, little bags of toiletries and whatnot--and stuck them in my backpack. At the airport, I went through security and had my backpack x-rayed. When I walked through the sensor, it was fine, but something in my backpack set it off. I took the bag over to a separate table and was asked to rifle through it. I spilled all my underwear out on the table, grabbed some nail polish and stuck it in a separate bag, and then opened another little bag I'd put in there. What falls out of it? A knife. 

It was a gift from a friend of mine for self defense while I'm traveling by myself (very practical, I think.) I had hidden it in my large suitcase for the actual journey so that I wouldn't get stopped in security with a knife. Unfortunately, that's exactly where I found myself. Six armed (and incredibly attractive) French police officers put me in handcuffs and led me to another room, where I spent 45 minutes explaining IN FRENCH that I didn't know the knife was in the backpack, even though I packed it myself. Arduous. 

I finally got into the gate, then onto the plane, where I sat with a French family and slept approximately 15 minutes out of the 8 hours I was en voyage. I got to Washington, where I succeeded in smuggling 3 different types of  unpasteurized cheese into the good ole US of A. I am now watching TV in English, thanking God that I didn't end up a foreign victim of the French prison system and, similarly, thanking God that customs didn't find my cheese. I love cheese.