Vacances: Pre-Trip

The next week we calmed down a bit and finalized most of the plans for our trip. Tuesday we went to a free showing of "Un Verité qui Dérange" or..."An Inconvenient Truth" in English with French subtitles. They showed it at Polytech and hey, no surprise, it started 45 minutes late. Afterwards we went with JP and Sou to our friend Gilles dorm room for fajitas. Holy hell am I glad I don't live on campus.

Going back in time to Tuesday afternoon... crazy story. I finished up at the computer lab after class, and went down to the tram stop. The next one wasn't for 12 minutes. Five minutes later Dee shows up. So we wait another seven minutes but no tram came and the wait time went up to 20 minutes. No way. We go over to the bus stop and wait at least another 10 minutes. I didn't have to actually get on, the mass of students behind me just pushed me on. It was ridiculously full. About 2/3 of the way to our stop, the bus is trying to turn into a roundabout, and this car is trying to squeeze by on the right (remember, just like in the states, buses take wide right turns), so the bus hits him and he gets super pissed even though it was his fault. Really funny. But it took us over an hour to get home.

Thursday we packed and ate a bunch of food and finished a bottle of champagne. Friday we both got up early to go to our 9am classes. After my class I had a little bit of time to go back and finish packing and cleaning up a little bit. I couldn't find the paper on which I wrote things we wanted to do and directions so I spent some time tearing up my room looking for it and ended up leaving about 15 minutes later than I meant to. I actually left at the time I told Dee I would meet her up at the centre-commercial and we didn't find each other until fifteen minutes before our train was to leave. But we got on the train with everything else and then I left my scarf on the navette (I believe). We arrived on time and made it to the Charles de Gaulle airport just fine. Then we hit a streak of bad luck and waiting in line. To make it short: we waited to see our flight on the departure board and when it didn't after about an hour we asked someone who told us we were in the wrong terminal. So, to the other end of the airport where they had even better news... our flight had been cancelled thanks to a cabin crew strike, and they didn't have any more flights to Amsterdam until the next day. The first terminal we were in had some flights, so back we went. It took about 20 minutes to get there and then to find the ticket counter. Once in line we waited over two hours to get to the counter. During this time Dee and I went insane. We had a small picnic, and sang many, many songs. All of that to find out that all the flights to Amsterdam until Sunday afternoon were either cancelled or booked. Maybe we could try a train? Fine. We found a train for the next morning at 6h55 out of a different train station. We took them for 101 euros each and went back into the city to the other train station. It was after 11pm when we got there. We had dinner and decided to try to stay up all night in either a bar or a club. This didn't quite work and after dinner and coffee we went in search of a hotel. We went to four of them before finding one with an open room and wasn't too expensive. We slept for about five hours before waking up and getting back to the train station. Our train arrived on time, we got on ok, and it left on time.
And now commences the story of our vacation.