How to be not so nice...I'm going to write a book on this

We braved the train to Lyon again yesterday and you know what, we made it almost, nearly, puuurty much near on time. We did have to get off of the train and take a bus in Bellegarde, but who cares, we made it in one piece with a good part our sanity intact.

Since I had a pretty important doctor's appointment in Lyon I wanted to get there early, and since past experiences had proved that if anything was true about SNCF it was that they are an UNPREDICTABLE lot, we decided to take the morning train. They didn't let me down. We did make it but there was an annulation and a changement and les chose imprévu and oh heck, the typical stuff I've come to expect from this fine, fine agence de voyage.

The bus was very nice though and a welcome diversion from taking the train. I think I'd consider taking the bus to Lyon in the future as long as the price is similar, which I think is not the case. It was a lot more comfortable than the train and you get to stare at all the truck drivers which is a sport in itself. Some truckers are surprisingly HOT and then some are so cliché it's almost scary that they aren't aware of it, wearing wife-beater t-shirts and sporting tattoos over the majority of their upper torso.

With about four hours to kill in Lyon I had grand plans of going about on foot, eating diced fruit in the sunshine and contemplating all the statues of Le Géneral this and and Le Roi de that, but the weather gods, having no statues erected to them, had decided differently and so we spent four nauseating hours in the Centre Commercial de Part Dieu contemplating with passive interest. . . perfume and scarves, FNAC's very limited selection of overpriced English paperbacks and visiting the tackiest accessory store you ever did see called Claires where they forcefully give you a panier to put all of your purchases in, as if the pink, plastic rhinestone bangles and the Hello Kitty! bijoux de portables knockoffs would be too weighty to be held in one's dainty hands for the ten minutes you might spend in their store.

The most annoying thing about Part Dieu mall for me was the bathroom, well that and the lack of a place to SIT, because why would you want to put seats in a mall? Oh dear people might want to stay and buy stuff. Why that's sheer madness I tell you! But oh yes, back to the bathroom lady on the lower level next to the pizza restaurant who caused me to lose my temper, which is something I've been doing a lot lately come to think of it. Baby S was out cold in his stroller after a 15 minute crying jag in the pouring rain, and so I entered the baby changing area and asked ever so politely to the fifty-two year old attendant if I could use the handicapped, pregnant lady, war veteran's etc. toilet to which she had the key, and to which she was letting every fifty-two year old mamie in and out of with lots of nods and smiles and winks. She said "no madame c'est interdit" and she said I should leave the baby in the hallway and use the other toilets. Ummm, okay right. A woman with a heart and a brain. I protested politely and then scoped out the other toilets, impossible to enter with even an oversized handbag, let alone a baby stroller and diaper bag, and so I went back and asked again, politely and she said "madame vous etes pas enceinte, j'ai déja dit que vous devrez allez vers les autre toilettes ... s'il vous plait!" and I felt that hotness that I felt last week with the Bulldozer, rising higher and higher and so I said "oui madame alors, je suis enceinte de trois mois!" and I proceeded to barge my way into the toilet anyway. She grabbed my arm and physically stopped me and I pulled my arm away dramatically, "c'est incroyable madame vous êtes en train de agresser une femme enceinte avec un enfant. . .vraiment incroyable!" everyone stared at her and I pushed my stomach out a bit for effect. With a public toilet full of waiting women staring she said a little too dramatically "je vais appeler le sécurité madame" and I said quite cleverly I think, though probably not in the most correct French, "madame c'est ne pas une coincidence que vous travailler dans les toilettes ici" , with sarcastic emphasis on the word toilettes and I marched away triumphantly.

The problem was I had nowhere to pee for the next three hours. That was until I discovered two and a half hours later that there was another toilet on the third floor, and that there was a third floor for that matter. The third floor toilet attendant was like the Cinderella to the other ugly stepsister attendant downstairs and she actually agreed to watch my petit bout-chou as she called him, while I peed. By this time the bout-chou was awake and so it wasn't necessary but she was sweet as southern pecan pie and more than made up for the sewer witch on the first floor. It was like visiting the antipode of the "water pipes/hand dryer" world.

I finally left the mall and took a bus across the town to my appointment, which can be read about later in my other blog if you care to nose into that part of my life, but which went well and left me feeling happy and full of hope. So all in all the day ended on a positive note in spite of the twists in the day.

My one regret was not being arrested by mall security for going to pee. It would have given me something fun to blog about and something fun to do for the next few hours, and they probably would have let me pee since every prisoner has at least that basic right, ... right?