P.Hill+Expository+Essay+Draft+1

I slammed my foot on the clutch, downshifting into third and praying that the car would slow me down enough so that smashing the brakes and rounding the tight curve ahead wasn’t as much of a shock for my three passengers. Although about five new roundabouts have been added to my daily commute back home in the past year or so, encountering them at every intersection still posed a new challenge as I navigated the tiny, unfamiliar rental car around an even less familiar city. Honestly, if the city weren’t so much more painfully picturesque than most cities surrounding Detroit, I’d have probably thought I was on a road trip in the US instead of almost 4,000 miles away; the radio dumped out the same generic pop crap that inundated the airwaves in my own small town, and the girls chatted away endlessly in English, despite all of our vows to improve our French this summer. I’d have been terribly disappointed if I wasn’t already so fed up with my immersion classes anyway, and thus far, this was the only actual vacating any of us had gotten to do on our vacation, so I didn’t have too much to complain about. So, away we sped, four American girls, in an American car, listening to American music and speaking VERY American English, trying to navigate the most beautiful and confusing city that any of us had seen. Despite it all, I was spent. Being the only person who knew how to drive a stick shift, I was elected to drive the four-hour stretch from Brest to Nantes, and after having been lost in the city for about an hour, I started getting pretty edgy and even more restless. My friend Katy, sitting beside me, took the role of navigator. She was the one who suggested Nantes in the first place and arranged our hotel. She would bark out directions to me faster than I could keep up with, so miserably butchering the names of streets that on several occasions I turned down the wrong road, only to wind up even more lost than we started, and having to maneuver us all back to square one, driving the same part of the //Cours des 50 Otages//, until I was ready to snap. Finally, Lindsay, the only optimistic one of us left, made a suggestion that, considering the number of X chromosomes in the car, probably should have come up earlier, “Why don’t we just stop and ask for directions?” And so, with that sound piece of wisdom we set our sights on finding helpful pedestrians instead of the now mythical //Hôtel Renova//. Looking back, I probably could have been more helpful. As the most proficient in French, I should have been the one to actually get out of the car and ask for directions, but I was already too frustrated and stubborn at this point to get out of the car until we reached our final destination. So off went Lindsay, with Marin in tow just in case, to ask a lovely middle-aged couple for directions. They were helpful and cordial, and even wrote down for the girls turn-by-turn where to go, sending them off with a wave and a smile back to the still-fuming and now slightly paranoid Katy and me. The directions had us turning around and going back the way we came, leaving us all to think we had missed our turn yet again. While we all thought for sure this was our big break, we didn’t realize until after our return that asking for directions was probably the worst possible thing we could have done; culturally, if a stranger goes out of their way to engage a French person, that person feels obliged to respond, even if they do not know the answer. This was certainly the case. Eventually we would learn that the hotel was within walking distance of that small stretch of road we had been traversing, and that it was on a pedestrian-only street blocked off by pylons, which is why we could not find the road in the first place. We would only have had to continue just a little bit further down that very road they turned us off of to find the parking garage, and not too distantly, the hotel. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until a chance stop for a bathroom break that I saw the pedestrian streets and Katy the hotel, but of course, that would not be for another hour after the initial stop for directions. So on we continued, now with no music and no chatter, just the occasional angry assertion about the trip, my driving, Katy’s navigating, Lindsey’s people skills, and Marin’s translation abilities as we headed down an even worse road than the one we had all been stuck on for the past hour and a half. Desperate, I began making random turns, heading in the general direction I believed the hotel to be. Despite my friends’ pleas, I continued driving, ready to find a new hotel if need be and pay the difference myself. Hopeless, angry at myself and God and Katy and the entire peoples of France, I weaved through the narrow, cobbled streets of Nantes until I saw it. I rounded a deep bend, and for what seemed to be the millionth time, I slammed on the brakes. This time, though, I pulled off of the road and parked instantly. I had never seen anything like it, and later I would come to know why. What we happened upon by complete accident is to this day one of the last Gothic Cathedrals in France. //Le Cathédral St-Pierre-St-Paul//. The massive structure stood at the base of a large square, towering over us like a white stone beacon of hope. The façade stood before us, austere but elegant, completely illuminated by the sun. Nearly 500 years in the making, this leviathan of a building took my breath away. It must have done the same for each of the girls, because their gasps drowned out my own, and Marin was out of the car before I could even process where I was. We were there only briefly—I did stop in the middle of traffic, after all, but we were there long enough to be overcome the shock of the beauty before us, take a few photographs, and undergo a complete attitude adjustment to boot. In the flash of the camera and the blink of an eye, we hopped back into the car with a new resolve to find the hotel and eventually return to the glorious cathedral the next chance we got. It finally felt like our vacation had begun. All of our misfortunes and our troubles seemed to melt away after finding that magnificent church.