Sunday saw me trying to get out of Paris for Barcelona. I walked to the Gare de L'est only to find out that it was the wrong station for purchasing a ticket for Limoges. So I headed for the Gare D'Austerlitz where I got a second class compartment with a cat, a Pekingese, an old man and his wife who starting knitting a sweater, a priest, and a grandmother, grandson and granddaughter all complete with wine bottles and lots of luggage. The kids started screaming and running in the corridor. They pulled on the dog's leash choking it. The people started talking loudly and drinking and the cat ran away and I never saw it again.
Paris was a beautiful city disappearing on the afternoon horizon. I also remember the sad condition of the rolling stock on the railroad and the dilapidated buildings along the tracks. I arrived at the Gare Des Benedictins in Limoges at 5:30 P.M. and immediately started looking for a youth hostel. The first hotel cost 30F and had a shower. I settled for a hotel on R. Pétiniaud Dubos at 19F per night. After getting the room the only food I could find was a loaf of French bread and a kilo of cherries at the farmer’s market. The hotels promise a petit déjeuner, but I never considered them to be a real meal. The lack of convenient fast food joints was beginning to take its toll. The French had their own time tables and if you didn’t know them, you went hungry. I was relegated to markets, stores, and vending machines. I found one machine not far from the railroad station that appeared to be promising until I saw the packaged maggots on its racks. Maybe they were a French delicacy, but upon further review I determined that I was looking at a fish bait machine.
I forgot to mention while I was looking for a room I circled the train station and was on Avenue de la Liberation (Liberation Street) when a car pulled up beside me and a man jumped out and started beating up a man next to me. Others jumped out of the car, pinned the victim down, and started kicking him in the head. I stayed out of it because it seemed like a domestic affair. The American flag displayed on my backpack probably wasn’t a good idea. Getting robbed or mugged was always a possibility while backpacking Europe. There were few women who traveled alone despite women’s liberation. Men do have their uses.
Prior to the mugging, Spain was on my mind and Limoges was still my final destination in France. The straw that broke the camel’s back regarding Spain was another incident at the train station when I was looking for food. Someone motioned me to a restaurant (bar) behind a maze of barriers and turnstiles where I promptly got lost. Only by jumping them did I extricate myself and in doing so someone blew the whistle on me - for what? I got mad and within hours I decided to shorten my European trip by cancelling Spain and go for Italy. By this time I wanted just to get out of France with its bad sanitation, rude people, and lack of food. I was always hungry in France despite its hard bread and cherries. The beating of a man next to me while I was walking down Liberation Street didn’t help either.
