Traveling
Blogging from the field...
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My flight to Paris has been delayed an hour.
The next gate over is an Air China flight to Beijing. They keep announcing things in Chinese. I'm amusing myself by listening for words... fei ji, qing lai, xie xie, yi xia, er shi yi. (Excerpted from announcements along the lines of "So and so on flight blah please come to the counter." and "Rows 1 to 21 may board now.") I should take up Chinese again. Somehow learning just a bit about the structure of the language has taught me to enjoy listening to it, recognizing when someone has the classic accent that we were taught. Flashback image of lao shi teaching us basic sounds, encouraging the class to be more violent about our fourth tones, and say ge so that the g opens up our throat before sliding into the e.
I got marked for an SSSS search. My infraction this time? Flying on a one-way ticket. Honestly, do they think hijackers won't notice that, oh, flying without id, paying with cash, buying last-minute tickets, buying one-way tickets are the ways to get searched? In the line I chatted with a nice businessman who was traveling to India and Tokyo. He was there for buying a last-minute ticket. I swear they were doing their best to waste our time. I took pictures this time, in my little silent rebellion. They didn't notice. It took 35 minutes to get through a four-person line.
Me, sitting around in the security line, waiting for someone to take me, my backpack, and my containers of sweater+shoes and laptop through the metal detectors:
I'm just hoping all of my luggage makes it through the intensive searches. I mean, the bags aren't exactly packed tightly, but I'm still having images of rolled-up panties spilling all over the inspection area, and them puzzling over my clubs or fold-up music stand.
Someone has a dog, a little pug-faced thing. The flight attendants are all cooing over it and taking pictures of themselves holding it. Elegant French women, all, in regulation long coats.
To my right is a beautiful black woman speaking in African-accented French to the balding older white guy next to her. A few minutes ago, she swatted the newspaper out of his hands to force him to pay attention to her. He is sitting facing her, to all appearances listening, but he hasn't said a word the entire time I've been watching. Her hairdo is a pile of wide ringlets extending out from the back of her head, supported I think purely by the volume of ringlets underneath. She has the biggest ring I have ever seen in my life on her left hand. We're talking measurable in centimeters in all dimensions. The stone looks yellow. She stands up, ties some sort of complicated garment made out of obviously real fur around her waist, and plops carelessly down on top of it. She is stroking her purse, one of those ugly brown ones with a repeating logo that probably cost a lot of money. I can see underneath the bench that she is wearing shiny platform shoes. Just the part supporting her toes peeking out from underneath her long pants is at least four inches long.
The clouds outside are rather striking:
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On the plane, I sat next to an american woman who has been living in France for the last 30 years on Belle-Ile-en-Mer. She told me about how she was a model when she was younger, went to Berkeley, then went to art school and actually became a working artist. She also told me how some island inhabitants are so inbred that they can't learn to read or write.