So this morning I woke up earlier than the last couple days and packed up for the train to Toulouse.
I walked down to the train station and arrived with enough time to stop along the way for pastries, and found a place that used the 'southern' appellation for it's pain au chocolate ("Chocolatine" - a regionalism which I only learned about earlier this year). I also ordered another item, a Feuilleté Lardon which I misread off the menu as Feuillette Lardon and pronounced the latter half with the hard "Let" sound I thought it required.
Feuilleté is the word for puff pastry (which honestly I should have learned by now), and the end is pronounced like "yehtay".
I was very confident in my order and the staff were appropriately bewildered by my confident request for an item they had never heard of.
When they figured out what I wanted and related it back to me I looked back at the sign and realized what I had done, and I wish I had been quick enough to say "ah, désolé, je ne sais pas lire, j'imagine" (oh, sorry, I don't know how to read, I guess) with the same casual confidence that I had ordered the pastry with. 😅
I would be catching the Intercity train instead of the TGV for this leg of the journey, for you Amtrak folks this is the equivalent of our "regional" service. Except that because France has the sort of train network that we associate with a proper country, the train still operates at something approaching a correct speed.
Even the regionals use mostly assigned seats now, and my seat was place quatre-vingt*-une in Voiture huit. (Seat 81 in car 8).
*(The French language still uses an equivalent of "score" for numbers above 70, so 81 is "four - twenties - one".)
So I swing breezily through the station, snagging a tiny coffee and a delicious canelle cake to enjoy on the train, and then wait until the track is assigned, and make my way to our train.
I wander down the length until I find car 8, and I get onboard.
I walk down the aisle and ... I count right past 81.
As far as I can tell, there isn't one.
Other people are climbing around me and my awkward giant backpack to try to make it to their seats (which definitely do exist! I have seen 62 and 90! Mine should be somewhere around here.) and I'm feeling very Lost American In The Way, so I make my way to the end of the train and put my backpack in the luggage rack so I can be less bulky while I'm searching, and return to the aisle. After a second trip up the aisle without success, feeling like I'm losing everything because maybe the numbers... Maybe the numbers aren't in order? Did I just? Was that 77 and then 65? No way... The whole point of numbers is that they can be ordered, surely no one would... It isn't possible... Do I smell toast?
I briefly, step off the rain to make sure there aren't two voiture huits.
On my THIRD slow walk down the aisle, there is is! 81! As of it has been there the whole time, cheekily watching me plaintively wander the aisle and climb past sweet ancient crones and exasperated mothers with prams.
I dive into the seat before it can disappear again, and look up, half expecting the number to have changed as I was sitting and for me now to be in the wrong place.
No, it's still 81, I'm safe. It seems.
So, having reassuring myself I won't be sitting pathetically in the baggage lock all the way to Toulouse, I start looking at the numbers of the seats in order.
In. Order.
And it is at this point that I discover that these seat numbers, which are detachable and mobile for who knows what devilish purpose... Are. not. Ordered.
I need to stop here and say it is my fervent hope that this is the result of hooligans. I need it to be that some Lycée's rugby team from Carcassonne , high on the adrenaline of clobbering Marseille in a David vs Goliath story for the ages, scrambled them all as a prank on the way home while left unattended by their coach.
I need to believe that because I need to be safe from idea that there is an employee of the SNCF who decided that the correct order of the seats was as follows.
(I recorded the ones I could read from my seat, because under no circumstances was I getting up, not on your life).
On my side, the seats went thusly (each is a pair, the first is the corridor, the second the window):
78
77
82!
81(My seat! My precious)
84!!
83
92!!!
93!?!
And on the other side of the car, where I could read more of them:
98
97
96
95
88!
87
86
85
64!!!
63
61!
62!!?!!!
WHO WOULD DO SUCH A THING?!
Truly, a criminal act had been performed on this poor car.
I consoled myself with my coffee and petite cannelé de Bordeaux, which was exquisite.
The legend says that Cannellés are a pastry made by nuns in the region, which came into fashion in Bordeaux because a wine filtration method of the age used egg whites, resulting in an abundance of yolks that were given to the nuns.
I'm not sure if this story is true, but the results, made with vanilla and rum, had a deep custard texture and they were delicious.
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