Further proof that Americans are terrified of old things.

Some people like to use their tourism to live their failed dreams. You know, where there are tourist photo opportunities where you can stand with a drum kit at a replica of the Cavern Club to pretend as though you were a Beatle and not the boring insurance salesman that you actually are. Other people have slightly grander dreams, such as the dream to live like interwar British aristocracy, which brings me to today’s post.

Basically right now, in my stay in some ridiculously large room in a manor-house-turned-hotel, I’m living out the dream to live like a 1930s BAMF. I fully recognize that I am privileged to be staying in such a nice place and to have a room to myself. The only problem is that I have never had the dream to live like a 1930s BAMF, as I’ve been stuck watching far too much Poirot this year. If there is one thing I’ve learned this year about ANYTHING, it’s that everyone with that much money at that time was constantly murdering or getting murdered. And, quite frankly, I am just too damn lazy for that right now.

Lazy, but also terrified. Terrified to the point where I just peed with the door open so that I could still hear the comforting sounds of the BBC warding off evil spirits in the bedroom. Like a character from a Jane Austen novel*, the door seemed concerned about a potential breach of the boundaries of propriety in my leaving the door open, so it kept trying to close itself. I solved this problem by propping open the door with a tin that was filled with dusty shortbread biscuits that smelled like someone else’s grandma—was this a recent gift from the hotel or an actual relic of the manor house?

*Yeah, I know Jane Austen waaaay predates Poirot. But that’s the thing with this place. WHAT YEAR AM I? I am in a confused time warp. I found myself checking the closets for Zombie Mr. Darcys and also checking the wardrobe for a portal to Hell Narnia. I checked under the bed to see if I could find the body of the great-grandmother who decorated this room, someone else’s fussy, WASPy matriarch with a penchant for smalls prints of Victorian girls picking unsettling blue flowers.

My mother is similarly creeped out by her own hotel room, and (ignoring the fact that I’m not only a grown woman, but also a grown woman who involuntarily kicks the living b’jeezuz out of anything else in her bed while sleeping) has offered to let me sleep in there as well. I turned down the offer as their room has a canopy bed, and I feel like if I were a ghost with a  taste for blood I’d be more likely to haunt a room with a canopy bed. She’s tried to comfort me by encouraging me to think of our stay in this terrifying manor house [that smells of every unpleasant memory of reading Charlotte Bronte (and also of dusty biscuits)] as though it were a camping trip.

Truth be told, I’d rather be camping. At least in the woods there are no faded, long-ago trendy Japanese prints of flora and fauna. At least in the woods there are no fussy cloth Kleenex holders. At least in the woods there are no terrifying portraits of long-dead rich girls who used to live in this very building and who might be looking up at you from Hell and resenting the fact that you are sleeping in HER bedroom and also have indoor plumbing now.

How many people have died in this room? Why is the ceiling so high? Why the hell are there so many goddamn chairs in this room?

This place is nice, and I am massively spoiled, but oh my God I just want to be in a Motel 6 right now.

Bitches love Iceland

So this one time I met this bitch who fucking LOVES Iceland. I mean, I thought I had a passion for England, but what I thought was my love for England is nothing but a slight fluttering of the heart that one might feel if England were a passing hot man on a bus, compared to this girl's infatuation with Iceland. See, when she would talk about Iceland I was tempted to ask if the two of them needed a moment alone.

Speaking of needing a moment alone with a country...


Everything we saw around us would remind her of something she saw in Iceland when she was on vacation there last week. She had a sip of beer and then talked about how she had a beer back in Iceland. I asked her if it tasted anything like the beer she was drinking now, and is that why she brought it up? And she said, "No, it was just a beer. The beer reminded me that I drank beer in Iceland." She then pointed at her sweater and revealed that it was bought in Iceland. We passed postcards in shops, and she informed me that (shockingly) they do in fact sell Iceland postcards in Iceland. We were in Paris at the moment, and she thought it important to tell me (lest I think otherwise) that, unlike these Parisian postcards, the Iceland postcards didn't have the Eiffel Tower on them. If it drizzled, the drops of rain would be compared to the size of the raindrops in Iceland. The five words she knew in Icelandic were unfavorably compared to the three words she had learned in French, and her understanding of the Icelandic governmental system (gleaned from about four days spent there) was used to give comparative analysis of the French governmental system (the understanding of which was gleaned from about two days spent in Paris).

Anyway, I met Mrs. Iceland when I was staying in a youth hostel in Paris back in December when I got so upset that I had to leave the country for a good ol' fashioned mope. She was exactly my age and, when compared with our other roommate who on our first night went on a tirade against toilet paper, she seemed relatively normal. Sure, I said. Sure I'll go touring with you tomorrow. I figured maybe this trip didn't have to be all about moping and feeling sorry for myself (though there'd still be plenty of time for that), and maybe I could even make a new friend.

Though I guess I should've taken the hint when she kept demanding that I do a British accent for her. She was Australian and for some reason was obsessed with the fact that I now live in England. "Speak in an English accent!" she'd shriek at me. "COME ON, SPEAK IN AN ENGLISH ACCENT!" The first few times I laughed it off and said that I couldn't do a good one. But then after about the tenth time she asked me I began to wonder if this girl had escaped from some sort of a treatment program for people with perverted obsessions with poorly done foreign accents. By the twentieth time I was contemplating suicide. I shrugged it off though and still agreed to spend the day seeing the sights of Paris with her, embracing the excuse to stop lying face-down on the bed and acting almost paralytic with sadness.

Spending the day with Mrs. Iceland turned out to be quite the eye-opener. I guess the major lesson I learned is that never, in ANY circumstances, tell people that you teach. I've learned that people take the line, "I'm a teacher" as an invitation to have explosive diarrhea of inane questions that would make even your 6th graders think, "What a retard." Like, it's to the point where I would now prefer to tell people I have a thriving career as a rapist, because then at least people would leave me well the fuck alone.

I guess I should have been relieved that for once this girl was expressing an interest in something other than my ability to do a fake English accent or the noble nation of Iceland, but in reality I just wanted to stuff a rag into her mouth. A rag that was attached to a Molotov cocktail. The soundtrack of Paris was replaced by this girl's constant stream of "What is that? What is this? Where are we? How do you say French fries in French? How do you say toilets in French? How do you say how do you say in French? Comment d---wait, how did it go? Comment dit-on France in French? Comment dit-on I like in French? Okay, j'aime Iceland. Is that how you say I like Iceland in French? How do you say fjords in French?"

She asked for a steady stream of vocabulary in French, and for some reason understood only by Mrs Iceland and God, she felt it necessary to specify "in French" at the end of every request. As though I'd suddenly assume she were asking me about Hebrew if she didn't clarify each and every goddamn time.

"Where are we again? Wait, where's that? What is that? How do you say Notre Dame in French? Notre Dame? That's weird."

Finally I suggested we visit the Sainte-Chapelle, as I had fond memories of the windows when I last visited a few years ago.

And then this girl came up with a winner: "Tell me the history of Sainte-Chapelle." What? Like, what about it? "Yeah, just tell me the history." Um...
I told her I didn't remember, that last time I was there about about four years ago. She then changed her question: "Oh. Then how much did the entry cost?" I reminded her that, again, it was four years ago and I didn't remember. And she just about had a stroke, so shocked was she. How could I not remember how much something cost four years ago???? THAT'S RIDICULOUS!!!

Yes, because what I remember about vacations is ticket prices.

I guess the clincher though was sitting at a sidewalk cafe, the kind of place where you pay 8 euro for a hot chocolate. Trying to make conversation, and perhaps sensing that I had long since checked out of the conversation, she asked me a question about religion. "Tell me the difference between Islam and Christianity," she asked.

Hmm. I honestly told her I was happy to talk about religion, but I didn't know where to even begin with that kind of question. Is there anything specific she wanted to know? Could she narrow down her question and then maybe I could help her out?

She carefully considered my request, and then asked, "So is Abraham a prophet in Islam and also in Christianity?" I answered her question by backing up a little, explaining what a prophet is, and then answering that, yes, Abraham is a prophet in both.

And she responded by nodding sagely and saying, "Ah, so they're the same religion then?"

I got a little flustered, "Well, not exactly. They have some things in common, and they both like Abraham, but they're also quite different."

"Right," she argued, "but if they both have Abraham as a prophet then they're the same religion, yeah?"

"Um. I..."


I guess now would also be a good time to point out that Mrs Iceland was the daughter of Methodist ministers.

At this point I gave up. You have a creepy fascination with English accents, you basically want to have sex with Iceland, you ask stupid questions, and now you think that having anything in the middle part of a Venn Diagram makes both sides of the Venn Diagram the exact same thing. Learn the concept of Venn Diagrams, lady, and then we'll talk. So fuck you, Mrs Iceland. We're done. Tomorrow I'd rather take a gamble on Miss "Toilet Paper is the Devil's Work."

Of course I spend the weekend in Paris and the only comment I have is about its bathrooms.

So this one time I fled to Paris on a whim. After a ridiculously long sit in Sacre Coeur contemplating what a complete and utter jackass I am, I decided that I was being called to something. Not to a vocation but to the toilets. I went on a quest that took me through narrow alleyways, stands of men desperate to sell me crepes, and European Urine Pockets. (Just as Chicago has random pockets of fart smell called, quite shockingly, Fart Pockets, Europe has random areas that smell of pee even when no urine is visibly presence)

Hang on, we interrupt this blog post to inform you that the two bespectacled, scrawny and massively nerdy folks, one female the other presumably male, at the table next to me at Café O’Conway at Gare du Nord Paris keep discussing what great quantities of weed they’re going to smoke in Amsterdam. Have fun with that, guys.

Once talk of drugs died down an awkward silence fell over their table. The guy pushed his glasses up and puffed his chest out like he was one of those birds hopping around trying to attract a mate. His voice dropped about five octaves and his accent even shifted to sound less Midwestern and more Californian: “Dude, at my college we have soooooo many pigeons.”

For a brief, unguarded moment the girl gave him a stare that seemed to suggest she was appalled at how boring this guy was, and then quickly looked away as she uncomfortably folded and unfolded the empty sugar packets that were on their table. Another awkward silence. You could practically hear the thoughts in the guy’s head: “How can I save this?” And clearly the best answer his brain could come up with was to say to the girl, “So we used to play ‘Kick the Pigeon.’”

Had we been in a slapstick film this would have been the moment for the girl to do a spit-take. But this being real life she just managed to somehow kind of choke on the last remaining drops of her Diet Coke. After the coughing died down she spluttered out a “WHAT?!”

Again, the guy tried to save it: “Um…um…yeah, it was a bloodbath! [*uncomfortable forced laugh*]” At this the girl started looking around desperately, presumably to find the hidden cameras, as she shouted, “WHAT? THERE WAS BLOOD???” The boy turned bright red, muttering, “Well, no, now that I think of it there was no blood…”

Anyway. Sacre Coeur. France. Toilets. I needed one. Soooo: after a long quest through Montmartre in which I suspect I may have at one point crossed into Belgium, I finally found a set of bathrooms that (to my paranoid, San Adreas Fault-warped eyes) looked rather precariously perched on top of this hill. In fact, even the sidewalk in the area was tilted and seemed to have fallen about halfway down the hill. Though nature kept calling and leaving increasingly frustrated voicemails, I couldn’t help but hesitate after imagining the entire bathroom sliding down the mountain about as gracefully as little me would slide down our hardwood stairs in a sleeping bag. Sliding down the stairs always ended in a few bruises on my ass, whereas riding the bathroom like a flume ride down this mountain would prolly end with my lifeless body in a mass grave somewhere in France because at the time my parents had no idea I was even in France. So do I risk riding the bathroom? Do I go big or go home (with wet pants)?

Pee gets the best of me and I end up entering this bathroom only to find a sort of old-fashioned courtyard. It’s tiled and wooden and for some reason it makes me think of Main Street at Disneyland, that same sort of faux old timey charm, though this being Paris the old timey charm was more likely vrai than faux. In the center of this courtyard—nay, piazza—was an attendant safely encased in what looked like an old-fashioned movie theater ticket window.

In general I find the European concept of someone being employed to facilitate your bowel movement experience a challenging one. But I find the bathroom attendants hidden away behind glass like they work in a high security bank instead of a place where people shit, write on walls, and occasionally have sex, to be a step beyond weird. If I had to rob something I don’t think the toilets at Sacre Coeur would be the first large haul target to come to mind. Then again, maybe I just haven’t given this enough thought.

I stood staring at this woman and her movie ticket window forcefield (“Hi, I’d like one ticket to the 2:00 pm showing of ‘Sam Urinates Today: Part II’”), and I tried to look for a sign indicating how much the Europeans would make me pay this time. Would I be able to hear her response or was this the sort of ticket window glass that as the bane of my existence, the type where the other person shouts (or mimes shouting) and all you hear is a faint buzzing?

Well, my questions were answered when I heard frantic knocking. Startled, I looked up to find the attendant knocking on the window with a panicked look on her face. Thinking my time had come to help someone in distress, I rushed up to the window to save this woman from whatever evil had befallen her. Heart attack? I’ve seen enough “House” to administer CPR. Invisible alien murderer strangling her? I’ve seen a similar amount of “Doctor Who.”

At this point the lady stopped her morse code of distress, pointed at a stall, and commanded me in French to go to it. Again, I was slightly confused so I hesitated. She tapped again, looking like she cannot BELIEVE how much time I’m wasting, and again barked at me in Paris talk to go to that stall. And in case I didn’t get the point, she had a terrified look in her eyes as she punctuated her command with an “ALLEZ-Y!” that seemed to herald the end of the world should I not make my way to that stall immediately.

I knew at this point I should just get my ass to the damn stall, but again I paused. I turned around and slowly passed a wary hand through the empty air to see if there were until now unseen hordes waiting behind me. No, this bathroom was so empty that if the movie ticket lady weren’t tapping the window and shouting “ALLEZ-Y” like it’s her job (maybe it is?), then I’m sure you could have heard crickets chirping, although in France I bet crickets play mournful accordion tunes of loves lost instead.

So I’m completely alone in this enormous bathroom up a mountain in Paris. And yet someone has decided I need to get my happy ass into a stall RIGHT NOW, hurrying like Indiana Jones trying to escape the Temple. Clearly the only appropriate response to this would have been, “Lady, how badly do you think I need to go pee?”