Paris.

I kept trying to write my Paris post while we were actually *in* Paris, but writing a blog about it felt too much like saying goodbye. So I waited until we were leaving Paris (about an hour from now; we're  at the airport as I type). That way I can say goodbye while trying to impart my feelings about this city.

Paris is... well, a friend once told me that the entire point of life is to get to Paris, and I absolutely agree with him. 100%.

I grew up in the suburbs and haven't ever really thought of myself as a "city girl". For me, a city girl and a suburbs girl and a country girl are all totally different things. Throw into the mix the fact that I'm ALSO a Colorado girl, which is a crazy, convoluted thing in and of itself...and you may see why enjoying a city, for me, can be kind of a big deal. Denver isn't  a city like New York, and New York is nothing like Paris. They all have different heartbeats and different ways of breathing.

I know that all sounds really floofy, like I'm trying to make it sound like this huge thing, but it's  honestly the only way I can think of to describe it. Paris can be just like any other city. There's graffiti, dirty sidewalks, confusing roads, millions of hair salons, poor sections, and rich sections. But there's something about Paris...I don't even know. It's  Paris. It's beautiful and exciting, and I just want to sit and watch the people walk by. I don't  even care that so many of them are tourists.

We arrived in Paris on Monday afternoon. Our hostess was thrilled to find out I understand french, and I was thrilled that she wanted to speak it to me. I've been a little paranoid that in the years since teaching, I've lost it. Luckily, that wasn't the case. Eve left us to the apartment, an itsy bitsy teeny tiny one-bedroom-one-bathroom-half-of-a-kitchen little thing.

I had planned to go walk around and see a few of the closest sites (our apartment was just inside the 10th quarter, at Porte Saint Martin). But I'd  forgotten that people who've  never traveled abroad before often experience culture shock. Steph has been out and about for several months, but Bri's travel has been confined to the States and a short middle school mission trip to El Salvador. If you've never experienced culture shock, know that it's awful. Everything feels like an emotional, physical, and mental overload.

So while Steph and I were happy to be in Paris, Bri needed to shut down. We let her nap while we walked down to the Seine and did some errand things like groceries and a post office stop. After being in Germany, it was refreshing to understand what was going on around us.

Walking in Paris feels like walking home.

"_______, it's What's for Dinner"

This post begins with a mystery. Let's call that mystery "What did we have for dinner in Stuttgart?"

We got on the train leaving Füssen just fine, if you don't count the part where the train wasn't labeled and we spent about ten minutes thinking that maybe, possibly, probably it was the right train, but our paranoia said BUT WHAT IF IT'S NOT, a feeling that should be familiar to anyone who has traveled on European trains. Steph declared it was right, so we stayed.

Everything was going great until our final connection between Buchloe and Stuttgart just....sort of...stopped. This would've been just fine if we'd had any idea why the train was stopped, but all we understood was that there was a delay, they were very sorry, and there was free coffee and tea in the cafe car.

We were supposed to arrive in Stuttgart at 19:56, but we were well past 20:00 when Steph went to the cafe to try to find out what was going on. The two people she talked to couldn't remember the right vocabulary to describe what was going on, so all we found out was that it wasn't an emergency with the train. (It was very reassuring. Ha.) When the train finally started moving, we'd been stopped almost an hour and a half.

About 20 minutes later we passed a massive fire and a half dozen fire trucks on the side of the tracks--obviously the emergency that wasn't as emergency. I had a funny moment when I said, "Weird. It smells like smoke, but not normal smoke. What is it?" Well, duh. Burning German trees would smell different from burning Colorado trees. It smelled nice, which is probably a bad thing to say. True, though.

By the time we got to Stuttgart, it was almost 21:00. We had a bag of soup for an easy dinner, so we bought bread at a bakery in the train station and then headed out. We stood waiting for the bus for five minutes before I realized we were supposed to be getting on the U bahn...which was under us.

The hostel was a chain business, and we'd gotten their cheapest room: a mixed dorm. This is where the amusing part started. So. If you ever want to get the best, travel with my sisters. Apparently everyone just wants to make them happy.

We walked into the dorm room (three bunk beds and two regular twin beds side-by-side) and immediately, Bri and Steph were offered the best beds from the guys inside. Seriously, I've never seen guys move so fast. The guy who was on one of the regular twin beds leapt off it to give it to Bri, and one guy gave me his comforter (not sure where mine had gone...). We struggled through putting sheets on the beds (I'd like to talk to the person who dried those fitted sheets to the size of a baby crib. Jerk). At 22:00, we were so hungry we didn't even care that it was past dinner: Steph and I asked our dorm mates where the kitchen was.

They laughed at us.  "Do you have bowls?" No... "Do you have a pot?" No... "How are you going to make soup?" SHEER DETERMINATION, PEOPLE.

Turns out that sheer determination doesn't work if the kitchen is closed. And the bar wasn't making food. So we headed back up to the room with an even better plan for dinner.

Bread? Check.
Meat? You mean two bags of beef jerky? Oh, so many checks.

I think we worried the other people in the room with how eagerly we ate our awesome dinner.

A Crazy King's Castle

Füssen is a small, relatively unknown town so far south in Germany that it's practically in Austria. We got there by flying into itsy bitsy Friedrichshafen airport, then taking trains through Bavaria.

I wish we had known to stay longer in Füssen, or that area at the least. It was beautiful and quaint. Everything looks like it belongs in a fairy tale. The "downtown" area of Füssen looks like Belle's town in Beauty and the Beast. Every building is painted a different pastel color, the streets are well-worn cobblestones, and there are colorful shutters on every window.

My first visit to Germany (in 2008) was to Berlin. I thought I'd "been to Germany". Ha. Berlin has massive streets and felt like a generic city--I wasn't terribly impressed. But Füssen. Ermahgerd, Füssen! The people are generous and nice. If you un-focus your ears (kind of like letting your eyes fall out of focus), German totally sounds like sexy English gibberish. Or Sims-speak, but better.

The nearby castle that Füssen is famous for isn't actually in Füssen. It's in Hohenshwangau, about ten minutes toward the towering Alps if you grab a car or bus. We got packed into a bus with a heck ton of Asian tourists--you know you're going to a popular destination if there's a flood of Asians around you.

In Hohenshwangau, i learned that Germans are really nice about you appealing German to them. And if you happen to, say, form a somewhat logical sentence, they think you speak German. I asked the ticket lady for three tickets for three people, and she started giving all these instructions in German....I know my face looked awesome because once she looked at it, she stopped herself and asked what language I'd prefer. We skipped Schlöss Hohenshwangau and the kings museum, which ended up being a really good thing. You see....there's no supremely easy way to get up to the tour area for Neuschwanstein. Either you climb a mountain, pay 6€ for a horse-drawn carriage, or pay 1,80€ for a shuttle bus.

Our tour wasn't supposed to start for over an hour, so we wandered past the town center to the lake, took pictures, wandered some more, then headed back to the horse carriage line (because CASTLE, people)....and realized that with the line in front of us and the total of one carriage on it's way down the mountain, we were going to miss our tour.

Missing the tour meant buying tickets and waiting all over again, and we didn't really have time for that because we had a 16:06 train to Stuttgart to catch. We walked over to the shuttle bus line...which was packed with about three busloads' worth of tourists and no bus in sight. We had 40 minutes to get to the castle, but the bus would essentially get us there 5 minutes too late. So, we did what any sensible Colorado girl would do: hike the mile up the mountain.

Everyone we had talked to said it takes 30 minutes to hike just to where the horse carriage drops you off (although "hike" is generous...the path is a paved road, really is just that it's super steep). THEN, there's still a 15-minute hike to get to the courtyard where tours begin. With all that in mind, we essentially ran up the mountain.

We arrived in the courtyard with 7 minutes to spare. It almost killed Briele and Steph and I felt gross with sweat, but we made our tour. Of course, the first thing they had us do was walk up a few flights of staircases. It was a good day for exercise.

Neuschwanstein castle was the inspiration for Disney's Sleeping Beauty castle. It's tall and skinny, with all white and gray stone with huge turrets. Everything about the outside screams YOU ARE IN A FAIRY TALE. But what I loved about the inside was that it just felt like a big house. Wood and plush fabrics create a cozy, almost cabin-like feel. It's designed with hallways around the rooms in the center, so as you walk down the hall you can either look out over the valley (gorgeous) or into the rooms of the castle (homey).

King Ludwig, the guy who designed and built the castle, may or may not have been crazy. He actually built a bunch of castles--Neuschwanstein is simply the most famous. Just before he turned 40, the court declared him insane and arrested him. A little while later, he died in really mysterious circumstances.

If there's anything that helps prove he really had lost a few marbles, it's his bed chamber at the castle. Not gonna lie, it was pretty cool. Intense, but cool. Imagine every aspect of Gothic architecture and design shrunk down into a space about 20 feet square. I wish we'd been allowed to take pictures. He literally topped his bed with an itsy bitsy Gothic cathedral (or castle, it was kinda hard to tell). Towers, buttresses, pokey details...the whole thing. He was definitely a nerd. Gothic bed. Gothic chairs. Gothic carvings. Gothic ceiling. AND he had a grotto built just outside his bedroom. That's right. A GROTTO. As in, an actual cave with actual stone walls. Just so he could end a particularly stressful day by saying, "If anyone needs me, I'll be in my grotto."

He had to have been a little off. He wanted to live like "the kings of old", but it's almost like he went for the look of that kind of King and then forget about the rest of it. While visiting another castle, he saw a beautiful singing/performance room that he later replicated in Neuschwanstein. Except he didn't design the acoustics for performances. He just liked the look of the room. Kind of like buying a bottle of wine for the look of the label, but never actually drinking it.

So, that was the awesome castle. We rode the horse-drawn carriage back down the mountain because it was closer than the bus (Bri was nearly dead by then) and only 3€ to go down. We even had time to stop at a restaurant for lunch (mmm bratwurst and fries) before we caught a bus back to Füssen.

Concerning Airports and the People in Them

I've always enjoyed flying. I love walking between gates and guessing where everyone is going. I love the feeling of the plane taking off, when the g-forces push you into the chair.

I don't, however, love babies on planes. Or, for that matter, men who apparently can't sit still and therefore slam themselves back and forth in their chairs. Sir. This is not a rollercoaster.

Briele's and my flight to London, besides the crazed baby and the dude who seemed determined to get my dinner all over my lap, went really well. Our layover in JFK proved that I've been spoiled with DIA. Would it kill New York to have a couple of bathrooms that both have working stall locks AND unclogged toilets?

We were supposed to meet Stephanie in Victoria Station, so after we melted in the sauna that was customs for non-EU passports, I went into business mode to find the Tube entrance. Of course, this meant that I went so much into business mode that I walked right past Steph in the arrivals area. Oops. I promise I missed her. I just didn't *see* her.

We decided to skip a hostel for the night, since it's kind of ridiculous to pay £17 per person when you have a 6:30 flight out of a new airport.

Speaking of new airports, Gatwick is....tiny. we couldn't go through security until 4 a.m., and we got there around 10:30 p.m. Sooooo what do you do when you're at an airport 6+ hours early? You curl up with 40 other people in a waiting area overlooking the lobby. And then you pretend to be able to sleep.

It was kind of like letting a chair put you in an awkward yoga position, then falling asleep because you couldn't do anything else. But you didn't wake up feeling relaxed...you woke up feeling like a year of your life had been sucked out through your spine.

The final airport we arrived in was in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Our flight was half an hour early. If you want to see something amusing, drop a plane-full of people into an airport with about four total check-in desks, then give them no one to pick them up and no trains for an hour.

Hint: even the expression for "Da heck am I supposed to do now?" is pretty much internationally recognized.

And then....we encountered trains.

Twelve, Part 4

Tiberon and I were probably stupid not to put more distance between us and Tessa. I mean, what’re you supposed to do? She was just a kid, and everyone was treating her like she was the most dangerously volatile being on the planet. Avel’s Palermo contacts were so afraid of her that after we met her, they gave us a car and let us do wherever we wanted. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little bit bad for her.

Poor Berto was assigned to follow us around, and Tiberon and I let him join us for dinner. Well, “let” is sort of a lenient word in this instance. More like, we very strongly encouraged him to talk with us over a cordial meal. It’s amazing what you can do with a dark-eyed illusionist and a semi-automatic.

On our twelfth day in Palermo, I was packing my bag and making sure everything was ready to bring across the border. It would be easier to take everything out of Palermo, since our hosts had such an impressive grip on the authorities in the city. But I still wanted to be prepared. As I was zipping the last compartment, I heard a tiny knock on my door.

“Signora?” It was one of the wives. Tiberon and I didn’t know enough Italian to tell them that we weren’t actually married, so I let them call me Signora or whatever they wanted. Very few of them ever wanted to talk to me; I guess I scared them by not being afraid of their young charge.

“Yes? Sì?”

“I want to ask after my cousin,” the woman said. She was petite, maybe 15 or 20 years older than me and wearing red Louboutins under a white Chanel pantsuit.

“Your cousin?” I asked. Was I supposed to know her cousin? My stomach dropped as I remembered the last time I had been to Palermo. It had been a few years, but...I sighed.

“Sì, my cousin Luigi, he has been a contact in New York for a year,” she said. It was hard to catch, but her voice took on a shrewd tone, and she eyed me like I was a piece of art of questionable origin. Luigi…the name rang a bell. I smiled, using the half of a second I had to think as quickly as possible. Luigi? Wasn’t he the guy that fell on his thing? That one time? I mentally kicked myself. I felt like I should know how to answer her, yet I was coming up with nothing but blanks.

“Luigi?” I clarified. The woman nodded curtly. I opened my mouth, ready to answer. The first word, “he”, was out of my mouth before I realized that Luigi was the guy Avel’s instructions had talked about. I was supposed to hate him or something.

“He…he’s a traitorous bastard,” I grunted, trying to sneer and work up some spit at the same time. The saliva launched about an inch away from my teeth and plummeted. It wasn’t the most beautiful shot, but at least I didn’t hit the Louboutins. The woman watched me spit with a slight hint of amusement playing at the very edge of her red lips. Without another word, she smiled, dipped her head at me, and disappeared.

I was suddenly very tired, and I stood unmoving for a minute before I remembered to check that I had the twelve little pills in my pocket. Then I sat down next to my bag. A tiny voice in the back of my head told me that I had just passed a test. Wasn’t sure what had gotten tested, but, hey, I don’t argue with passing scores.

Tiberon came in then, sat on the bed next to me. “Some lady asked me about Luigi,” he said. “I never thought I’d use so much Italian cussing.”

“She asked me, too,” I said as I stood and stretched. “Think they were making sure we’re actually from Avel?”

He shrugged. “No other explanation. C’mon, let’s get out of here. I had some of the ladies dye the kid’s hair. They were shaking in their fancy feet-killers the whole time.”

Laughing, we both threw our bags over our shoulders and went to find Tessa. She was outside, sitting cross-legged on a bench in the sun. Her hair had been black, but now it was much lighter, like mine. She was wearing it down, hanging in her face. I dropped my bag on the ground next to her, making her jump.

Berto was on the other side of the courtyard, reading a paper and trying to look like he wasn’t actually there. Tessa glared, then smiled when she saw that it was me and not one of the Italians. “You’re late,” she said as she unfolded her legs and slipped her shoes on. I looked at her intently, tilting my head.

“You cut your hair, too?” I asked. Tessa shrugged as she self-consciously touched her new bangs.

“Do they look bad?” she asked.

“Oh…no! I just wasn’t expecting them,” I said. “They look good.” Tiberon tossed our luggage in the trunk as I looked at Tessa, thinking that now her eyes looked even darker, deeper now that they were framed with hair with a slight hint of chestnut.

“Berto! You’re driving us!” Tiberon yelled. The little man grimaced, tossed his paper down and stalked over to us, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Girl…in back,” he said in the broken English we’d become fluent in over the past twelve days. I looked down at Tessa, who didn’t seem very happy, but she obliged Berto by sitting as far away from him as she could manage in an enclosed space. I saw her eyes light up mischievously so I poked her in the side before she could drive the poor man crazy.

We drove for about twenty minutes before the car stopped at a dock. A small ship was a port and passengers were boarding. I got out and stared for a second, then looked back at the other three.

“Boat?” I asked. Tessa smiled sweetly.

“I don’t do planes,” she said. She even tossed her hair at me as she walked towards the gangplank. Tiberon came up next to me and handed me my bag and our papers.

“Dudes told me this morning. Sorry I forgot to mention it,” he said.

“It’s fine. But…why are we taking a boat? It’s going to take forever!”

“Tessa doesn’t do planes,” he said, mimicking the girl’s tone from before.

“Seriously?” I asked. “We’re taking a boat across the Atlantic just because some kid doesn’t like flying?”

Tiberon didn’t answer; he just lifted his shoulders in defeat and went to join Tessa. I turned back to Berto and thanked him before following them.

As I caught up, the boat changed shape. Lines melted and regrew, and new colors jumped into existence in a kaleidoscope of awkward movements as I stood still and dumbfounded. For a minute I forgot about Tessa and I looked around for Avel. The small ship now had wings and levels like a skyscraper. I blinked. My head hurt from trying to remember that it was just a boat, not a flying building.

Tessa giggled, giving away the game.

“Stop it,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I remembered Avel’s instructions. I was supposed to give Tessa the first dose of the twelve pills now. “Here, you have to take this.” I handed her one of the tiny brown pills from my pocket, along with a plastic water bottle.

“What is it?” she asked warily.

“I have no idea. Avel’s orders,” I said. At the sound of his name, Tessa relaxed and unquestioningly popped the pill in her mouth and swigged some water. The plane-boat thing was so strange, I couldn’t help but stare at it. I don’t know if Tiberon noticed, but the pill had an immediate effect. Tessa’s eyes grew wide with surprise, her pupils dilating, then contracting, as the illusion of the flying building-boat disintegrated and was replaced with reality.

Avel had managed to take away the one thing that made her terrifying. I felt elation and relief flood every inch of me, only to be taken over by this thought: I only had enough for a day's worth of traveling.

Twelve, Part 2

This is Part 2, obviously. If you need to read Part 1, the link is just to the left. Enjoy! -m.

The airport terminal was packed with people. I mean, wow. Tiberon and I pounded through the automatic doors at near-full speed, our bags bouncing over the threshold and landing awkwardly on single wheels. Our acquired driver hadn’t dropped us off in front of our airline, but no matter. It was only a few steps away. We jostled over, cut in line in front of a family of 8 with a pair of harried-looking parents trying to count everybody, and waited.

Tiberon flung his arm around my shoulders and pulled me tight. When I looked up at him, confused, he grinned at me. Ah, yes. The surnames on our passports were the same. Avel wanted us to be man and wife for the time being. I looked down and twirled the simple fake diamond around my left ring finger. It had felt strangely exhilarating when Avel had pulled me aside and put the tiny jewelry box in my hand. I’m pretty sure he got it at Kohl’s or something. I shook the thought out of my mind and focused on the moment; I leaned into Tiberon’s side and wrapped my arm around his waist. We were directly behind a group of sorority chicks in mini skirts and five-inch heels, and in front of them was an insufferably long line of airline patrons.

“Where’re we going?” I whispered. Avel hadn’t wanted me to know until we’d gotten to the airport. I don’t know why. It’s not like I was going to tell anyone.

“Check it out,” Tiberon said, handing me a stapled pair of papers.

I glanced at the first page. It was a printout of a friendly email saying our tickets were booked and all we needed to do was check in with our passports. “Palermo? Why the heck are we going to Palermo?” Tiberon shrugged as we stepped around the corner created by the queue bars, his eyes on the legs of the college girls in front of us.

Palermo is the capital of Sicily, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s also home base to the Italian Mafia. I’d been there a couple of times before, nabbing art and some other things. I thought of the twelve little pills in my front jeans pocket. Avel had always been completely against drug running, but I couldn’t think of what else the pills were.

My mind was exploding; I wanted to ask Tiberon so badly about what he knew we were doing, but there was no way I could do that in the middle of the airport. I would have to wait until we were seated. Standing there was agony, especially since it seemed that the line was hardly moving. I glanced at my watch. We'd only been inside for 10 minutes, but it felt like hours.

Finally, the lady at the desk efficiently took our papers without smiling, printed our passes, and growled at us to put our baggage on the scale. We were dismissed a minute or so later, and Tiberon and I walked quickly around the corner, down the escalator, and into the security zone. I held my breath when I accidentally made eye contact with one of the guards. Years of smuggling things and I still got nervous. Ridiculous. With a tight smile, I looked away and then down at my boarding pass. My passport said that my name was Renee Diebin, Tiberon’s was John Diebin. Avel must have thought it was really funny to give us a last name that, in German, was closely related to the word for “thief”.

Despite being chock full of hundreds of slow-moving travelers, the line wound pretty quickly through the rails, and in almost no time at all I was handing over my boarding pass and photo ID. The woman looked at me shrewdly and I smiled at her. My heart was beating so fast, I thought I was going to pass out. And then someone pinched my butt. I turned halfway to see Tiberon grinning like an idiot behind me. I blushed and smiled back, swatting his next pass away from my backside. I faced the security guard again; she was looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

“My husband,” I said, smiling apologetically. The woman nodded once, handed me back my papers, and ushered me through the scanner.

Nothing beeped on me or Tiberon, and we were seated on the plane just before the pilot addressed the whole plane. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking...”

While the attendants were doing their routine, I pulled a long envelope out of my pocket. Inside was a piece of paper folded in thirds. It was typed on a piece of graphing paper and was remarkably clean, despite the fact that some of the letters had been typed repeatedly, making them darker. Leaning towards the window, I unfolded Avel’s instructions and read them quickly.

I looked up at Tiberon, who was reading over my shoulder. His eyes were easily as wide as mine. He jabbed his finger at the last line on the page.

“Outbursts?” He rumbled in my ear. I raised my shoulders and held them there in an extended shrug.

"Hair dye?" I asked him. This time he shrugged.

"Must be in my bags," he said, adding, "I ain't doin' no babysittin'."

The way he said it made me think that he'd had no idea what Avel had planned. I refolded the paper carefully, reining in the urge to smell it, to see if any traces remained...but no. I slipped it back in the envelope, folded it, and stuffed it in my pocket, trying my best to seem like I didn't care whether I messed up the message or not.

Engines whirred and I heard the flight attendants quietly asking passengers to turn off their cell phones and to buckle their seat belts. Click, click, click! resounded all around the cabin. My stomach dropped as the plane took off. I stared out the window for a few minutes before leaning back and closing my eyes. If I was going to have to drag a little girl halfway across the world, I was going to get as much real sleep as I could, while I could.