I’m sitting here quite concerned about what only appears to be a thin, plastic sliding partition, one that doesn’t close all the way, as the door to the bathroom. The reason for my concern is that Keone just walked in proclaiming that he was “about to drop bombs like nobody’s business.” In fact, because the toilet is tucked into a corner of the bathroom, he just slid open the partition now, revealing only his knees and face, to show me how to operate the shower – a knob that switches water flow, controlled by our sink’s faucets, between our tap and shower head.
When we got off of the train to Tours, we were a bit lost as to how to get to our hotel. Thirty minutes and a 5 Euro map later, we realized that we would be staying a little ways out of the city centre. We boarded a bus headed in that direction, but, out of our increasing worry that we would pass our stop and then be whisked away into bumblefuck France, we exited a few stops too early. I now realize that our map only contains large streets. We maneuvered our way to the main highway by a one mile U-shaped path, a path which we then found out was entirely unnecessary owing to the existence of intermediate streets. As the intermediate street path involved a few turns, it wasn’t immediately apparent to us just by looking at them, that it would lead to the main highway.
Regardless, we walked on an unevenly poured tar path on the side of a freeway, passing a car full of French guys, about our age, who yelled “Bienvenue a Tours,” in the direction of our hotel. We must have walked nearly three miles with packs on our back and front (we started wearing our smaller day bags on our stomachs – in essence we looked like pregnant people) along with that cardboard box, mentioned earlier, whose contents had now dwindled to grapes, carrots, half of a bottle of water, and three bananas.
The hotel wasn't even in the proper town, so we ended up staying at a different hostel, Hotel Terminus, that was right next to the station.
We then did our laundry, which was a fiasco. Because of some poor laundry machine design, if the knob used to set type of wash – whites/colors/permanent press/woolens – is turned 360 degrees, the machine locks and doesn’t run. Being industrial washers, we couldn’t pry them open. Essentially, my nice hoodie, polo, towel, and all of my underwear would have to be abandoned if nothing could be done last night, since this morning at 8:00am, the store’s opening time, would be well past our train’s departure. This happened at 5:30pm after the manager had left for the day, trusting an automatically locking door to shut at 8:30pm, closing his store. We called him at the emergency number posted in the store, but he spoke fast French which Keone couldn’t understand. We asked some random person walking by on the street to speak with him and translate to us, but we couldn’t figure out the machine, still. In a one mile run back to the hotel to use a bathroom, I decided on a whim to ask our concierge to speak with him again, and this time, the manager agreed to come in (at 8:15pm) and fix it. For nearly 3 hours, I thought I would have to abandon my underwear and towel in a rogue washing machine in Tours, France. We spent the better, and what would have been an enjoyable part of the day, 5 hours to be precise, in a Laundromat.
No comments:
Post a Comment