So, here I am beginning my second and last year in France. I arrived Tuesday morning and have had 18 hours of class since thursday morning. Yuck. That's not the point of this post though. This evening, after 6 grueling but interesting hours of corporate law I returned home after stopping off at the grocery store to pick up some dinner and wine. I arrived home, turned on the computer, fully intending to watch a movie or some Bewitched while enjoying some good food and drink. The water was just starting to boil when Gretchen called. For those of you who don't know her, Gretchen is one of the two students from VLS who came to Paris this year and will be taking the Master 1 classes like I did last year.
Anyway...Gretchen called to see if I wanted to get together this evening for dinner. I said I'd be right there (which from where I live to where she is means more like see you in an hour), turned off the stove (wouldn't do to boil a pan dry, burn one of Nico's pans and leave the gas burning for several hours) and out the door I went. The usual train delays later (forgetting not for the first time today that it is saturday and thus trains are not as frequent) and I am at the pre-arranged metro stop and stepping out of the metro. As I step out I notice a homeless-looking, disheveled man with a crazy gleam in his eye intently walk toward a man half snoozing on a chair in the station. He walks right up to the man, leans over and crows loudly in his ear like a rooster!
What was going on?!?! For a moment I thought I didn't see/hear this correctly and that there must have been a rooster on this guy. But no, this guy was too thin (not overly), carrying nothing bulky, and I know rooster calls too well to think it was a real one. (Its been a long tiring week and I am not yet accustomed to the random weird people in the metro again.) The rooster man walks away from the semi-comatose man in the chair (he didn't seem to react much to the rooster crowing in his ear) and down the station toward another person sitting in a chair waiting for a train. He repeats his rooster call at the next person, and then the next, never saying a word, making any gestures or in any other way indicating how crazy he must have been. He never laughed, just got up in someone's face and crowed!
A part of me wanted to stay and watch to see what this strange rooster man did, but a larger part of me wanted to go meet up with my friends and to avoid drawing the attention of the rooster man.
So, next time you're in Paris near the Saint Ambroise station, keep an eye out for the crazy rooster man and bien venu a Paris!!!
Sunday, September 7, 2008
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