From petit déjeuner to déjeuner ordinaire

22 March 2009

The night before we went to France I stayed at Lauren’s so that we could go to the station together. Lying in the dark on the futon that night I started to wonder what French I could remember, having dropped the subject at school 13 years ago. For a start, let’s see if I can count … “oans, zwoa, drei …”. No wait, that’s Austrian dialect.

The next morning Lauren drove us to Ebbsfleet International station. We arrived in good time, quite possibly because Lauren ran pretty much every red light that came before her. The final roundabout by the station was blocked by lorries moving very slowly, a small delay that she quickly overcame by going the wrong way around the roundabout to our exit.

Inside the station we checked in and given our tickets – Lauren was called beautiful by the bloke at check-in, but then treated like the common criminal she clearly is at the security gate, as her bag was emptied and all the various cameras and lenses were checked for explosives and tiny terrorists.

The other side of security, at the gate, a police dog was being trained to sniff out drugs that were being planted on passengers. The dog still needs to practise. Either that, or should just pay more attention like we did when the officers were planting the – assumedly fake – drugs.

Soon it was time to board the Eurostar and be whisked away to France. The journey is only an hour and ten minutes long and so I found myself expecting to reach the tunnel much sooner than we did. Every tunnel we entered made me think, “ok, here we go”, before we popped back into sunlight ten seconds later. Ok, so that probably wasn’t the English Channel we passed beneath.

Soon enough though we’d gone through the tunnel and were zooming through French countryside. We didn’t have a window beside us, so photography was somewhat limited. We did play with Lauren’s fish-eye lens though; a lens of which one must be very wary, as even if you’re sat right behind the user, or maybe even in another room, you’re probably in the shot.

Our entrance to France couldn’t have been more stereotypically French if it had tried. We stepped out of the station through a plume of cigarette smoke and to the sound of a busker playing the accordion at the bottom of the escalator. Lauren pledged to give him some money if he was still there when we came back that evening. And that’s the story of how Lauren kept her money and the busker didn’t get a bean.

It was now about lunchtime and so we wandered through the town towards the food. Along the way we were accosted by a kid begging for money – while his mother remained seated on the pavement. He followed us for ages, carrying his packet of chips and saying, “s’il vous plait, madame”. Stumped for anything else French to say to him, I told him to shoo with a very polite “allez!”. Eventually he left us alone when Lauren told him we had nothing for him, threw a chip at us and went off to bother someone else.

Having found that Lauren’s usual haunt Paul’s had shut in January we found another restaurant in the main square and settled down for a good session of people-watching and sandwich and frites-eating. We then topped that off with The Best Hot Chocolate In The World According To Lauren from the Paul kiosk next to the restaurant.

Finally we left our seats to continue our sightseeing, calling “au revoir” to the waiters. “You sound so British,” Lauren told me.

Click for the set

2 Comments Posted in: encounters, friends, photography

Comments

2 Responses to “From petit déjeuner to déjeuner ordinaire”

Tim Frost
26th April 2009 @ 8:40 pm

Do you know what those black devil babys in Lille were all about. I have a friend who went over and was completly puzzled. She asked me to look on the net for some ideas, and your web page was the only reference I could come up with.
Thanks Tim
2009 : dreamdust
31st December 2009 @ 8:07 pm

[...] to, well, all of Europe, I’ve turned into a bit of an itchy-footed one. Lauren and I took the Eurostar to Lille for a day in March, where we photographed everything they have and then just two days [...]