Episode Six: Crossing the English Channel

Sir John Gielgud and the Stuffy, French Water Hostess

The trip from Edinburgh to London is pure hell.

We don’t leave the station until one in the morning and the train car we are in happens to be occupied by a group of fifteen high school kids who are not old enough to realize it does not take much to make others snap.

The lights go off, as if they are going to let us sleep, but then are replaced by this odd bluish-green glow. It is not bright enough to read by, but strong enough that everyone around you appears to be in the middle of a bad bout of seasickness. Chris thinks the light is put in here to purposefully make you feel ill. I start to wonder how truthful this may be.

The kids continue to get louder and louder and I begin to wonder if they are orphans and have never had parental guidance. Maybe they are a hard-of-hearing club on a field trip. I keep hoping they will eventually nod off to sleep, but I think the volume they are emitting is to ward off the drowsiness that their wee brains are starting to feel. The train cannot go fast enough, the light cannot be green enough, and the only thought I have that appeases me is that I am not in a country where livestock is allowed to roam free within public transportation. Then again, if livestock were to get too loud, you could always kill it.

Chris is able to sleep fitfully by using his window as a pillow and his chair as a bed. The only way I am able to slip into a light coma is by cranking my Walkman up as loud as it will go and then drifting off to the sound of the Counting Crows. Unfortunately, every forty-five minutes my tape reaches the end, shuts off and the sound of the adolescent monkeys snaps me awake.

We arrive in London at seven-thirty in the morning. It is a weekday, and the English are going to work. We are foolish enough to try and squeeze ourselves, with our backpacks, onto the subway. It takes us five tries before we find a train with enough room for us to fit into. I feel like I am in a Japanese movie I saw once where they have guys whose job it is to smash everyone into the subway cars to make sure the doors will shut. I am being assisted by a nice English gentleman who, making sure the doors will close, shoves my backpack-laden body into the people in front of me.

The stop we are meant to get off announces that there is a bomb threat and the train will be moving ahead to the next stop. I can’t help but wonder why the train is still passing through a terminal that is supposedly seconds away from exploding, but the people around me seem more annoyed than scared and I assume all is going to be OK.

We eventually get to a train that is supposed to take us to Ramsgate. There we will cross the English Channel and hit the European mainland. We are in a rail car with a group of guys that are hoping to one day retire as complete idiots. They are talking, yelling, swearing, and just pretty much advertising why testosterone is not always a good thing. Luckily the trip is not too long and after what we have just endured on our previous train ride, a burping contest would not phase us (nor surprise us with this bunch).

We arrive in Ramsgate and try to figure out how to get to Oostend, Belgium without ending up in Sicily or Rhode Island. The train leaves us off at one end of town and we have to get to the other side where the boats are. One would think that all we should have to do is point ourselves in the direction of the water and then take steps, but for some reason, it becomes much harder than this. The streets are cute and the houses are adorable, but nothing seems to go in a straight line. Pretty soon we are both cranky and hot and the only thing keeping us from killing each other is the knowledge that the last one left alive will still be lost in this stupid town.

We stumble upon a small grocery store and I happily enter with thoughts of a nice lady making me a sandwich. Unfortunately, this shop only sells things for you to take home, not to eat here, and we are even more disappointed to find that they do not specialize in an overabundance of junk food. We buy some crappy candy bars and a couple of sodas and I grab some cheese and a loaf of sliced bread. The next ten minutes we spend wandering toward the sea, eating cheese and bread sandwiches, which are neither good nor moist. We finally reach the water and are excited to skip down the millions of steps leading to the sandy beach.

We find that the giant, cruise ship is not due to leave for a while yet and takes almost two hours to chug its way across the channel. Neither of us is in the mood to wait and we inquire about the sleek-looking jetfoils we see leaving port every twenty minutes. They only take an hour to get across the channel and they cost an extra £7, but we figure out that we saved £9 by taking the overnight train from Hades to Hell, so that is enough to convince us to go for it. The next one does not leave for another twenty minutes and I am feeling ill from the sandwiches that we ate, so I grab a sausage to appease my stomach.

Being inside the jetfoil is like getting on a Disney ride. The seats are all facing forward, we strap ourselves in and there is an air of excitement as everyone pictures us slicing through the water at top speeds. What they don’t tell you is that in order for the jetfoil to work, it raises itself out of the water, thus forcing the windshield to face the blue-sky above. There is not a drop of water in sight. After the first two minutes Chris points out that if we had taken the big ship, we could have walked around the deck and smelled the salty air. I am just trying to figure out the fastest route to a water closet, should I choose to become seasick later.

As we blast across the water Chris realizes he is sweating. He knows this cannot be a good sign. He thinks he needs some air and is wondering why they cannot just open a window. A hundred-miles-an-hour and we cannot open a window? Sometimes I find his complaining to be just what I need to take my mind off other things. He thinks this jetfoil experience is surreal. He looks around us and announces he has two words for me: braces and nose-hair clippers. He is on a roll and I just sit back and enjoy it.

He wants to know if men really get to a point, that nose-hair becomes an accessory? He points out that in the row in front of us, and three seats over, is a man that looks like Ernest Borgnine, with a little bit of Nikita Khruschev mixed in. Chris wants to know why he is smiling so much. Is he that happy? Does he always look that way? Then he points out a woman to the right, across the aisle, her eyes are bugging out, and he thinks she looks like a Chihuahua.

I am trying not to laugh and hoping that those around us do not speak English. Luckily, everyone is concentrating on his or her menu. Then he points to the guy two seats over from me. He says this guy really worries him and not because he looks like Sir John Gielgud with a dash of that funny-looking guy with the bushy eyebrows in The Hudsucker Proxy. Sir John has been rocking back and forth and wiping his brow, and just before the trip started, Chris says that he watched him have a major bloody nose. He narrows it down to the fact that he either doesn’t like sea travel or that he is dying of something and wants to fulfill this one wish before passing on. Or maybe he is just ill.

He looks like he is on the verge of blowing some chunks and Chris decides that he must be sick. For a moment he is happy because he is not the one sitting in front of Sir John, but then becomes agitated when he fears being called upon to perform an emergency procedure for a cardiac arrest. What exactly that procedure would be I do not know, but it has gotten Chris very upset.

The lunch cart comes around and Chris cries out, “Egad!”

We watch as the Sir John orders a lunch, wipes his brow and then digs in. When he finishes his meal he resumes his rocking back and forth, but he looks a lot better. Chris thinks the lunch was actually a ticket to better health for him. Then the duty-free cart rolls around and Sir John buys three bottles of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Maybe he is not ill after all, Chris offers, just a little too friendly with the bottle.

The air conditioning finally kicks in and Chris becomes happy again. Now we are watching the jetfoil attendants as they make the rounds with lunch trays and duty-free alcohol. I cannot understand why they would serve lunch on a trip that does not even last an hour, but I guess there must be some plan behind it. Maybe the food is over-salted and this helps them to sell more booze. If this is the plan, it seems to be working.

The attendants are French and have the combined personality of a dog dish. During the take off phase, they went through the emergency procedures like they had somewhere else to be. The distribution of lunch brought them no closer to smiles and the handing out of duty-free bottles only seems to be annoying them. I am assuming they are not working off commission. The thing that did amuse us though was that they are the ones that threw off the ropes that tied the jetfoil to the dock. Chris thinks it is funny that they have to do this in skirts, I am surprised that these women do much of anything at all.

We finally arrive in Belgium. We have decided not to stay in Belgium because we do not want to have to exchange money just for one night and we want to be closer to Amsterdam in the morning. We are taking a train that is supposed to go to Utrecht, right outside of Amsterdam. Of course, this is all according to what Chris says; for all I know I could be in Saudi Arabia right now.

We are at another of the many stops this train is making and Chris has his biggest European experience yet. He sees a little old man standing at a train crossing, wearing brown pants and a red sweater over his shirt. Over the sweater, he is wearing a green sports coat that is buttoned and looks a little too small. He has a beret on over what is left of his gray hair and he looks like he can do with a shave. Hanging from his lip is a cigarette and he is standing in front of a green field and some cows. Chris says he probably plays chess in the park, boules on the weekend and argues with Pierre over a glass of Sherry. Every now and then Chris reminds me why I like him so much.

Next…Holland!!!