Paris Travel Complications

Last weekend, I journeyed to Paris with a couple of girls for the weekend.  It was a pretty intense experience!  For anyone who does not know, the Euro Cup is currently being held in Paris this summer, basically a huge soccer (football) tournament between different European countries.  Security was at an all-time high all around Paris, especially with the bombings that happened a few months ago.  I received a bunch of State Department warnings about the possibility of terrorist attacks in the country and the week leading up to the date of my departure the news repeated warnings to British citizens visiting France that there was no guarantee of their safety.  Scary thoughts!  I was getting pretty nervous a few days before, but I had already paid for the apartment we were staying at and would not get a refund if I decided to pull out that close to the arrival date.  Plus, there was the other girls going with me, I couldn’t just leave.  But I didn’t have to worry so much, I did have two people constantly traveling with me, and it turns out that a large portion of our study abroad group was traveling there anyways, most on the same train!  So we had each other if anything happened.  And nothing did, thank goodness! 

There was a slight hiccup at the beginning of our trip.  We all took the Eurostar into Paris from London after our Charles Dickens walking tour concluded near the steps of St. Paul.  The Eurostar is a high-speed rail that travels under the English Channel and through France to Paris all under 2 hours and 30 minutes.  Or it was supposed to be that long, however, we hit a slight glitch.  There were protesters on the tracks about 15 minutes outside of Paris, holding up the trains for longer than an hour.  So our 2 hr 30 min train ride turned out to be nearly 4 hours!  We got in so late that our landlord for the apartment that we rented for the weekend couldn’t wait up for us any longer and had to send instructions about the apartment via text. 

So we finally arrived in Paris, at the Gare du Nord International Stations, and it was chaos.  No riots or anything, but the place was packed.  A soccer (football) math had just finished and drunk fans were stumbling all around the platform and in the streets, yelling at each other and at the fans of the rival team.  The line for the information booth was more of a mob around the counter, so there was no chance for us to ask any questions in the next hour, and the taxi line was even longer.  We had pre-ordered metro passes to use, but the place where we were to pick them up was closed, because it was nearing midnight by the time we starting trying to get out of the train station. So we did the thing that we hoped would work best for us and tried to find the closest metro station nearby and then walk to our apartment. 

The first route did not work out well.  The streets were full of drunks, and one guys even hissed at us!   We immediately did a 180 and moved in the opposite direction.  We finally made it to the metro station and fortunately meet a very nice and understanding employee who was cleaning out the ticket machines.  The metro line stops selling tickets after midnight, so when she noticed the three of us very desperately trying to get the machine to give us tickets, she came by and gave us some and got us through the gates!  The metro line was easy enough to navigate once we were on it.  The hard part was navigating the streets of our neighborhood in the dark.  It took another 20 minutes to find the place (we passed it several times, as it was right next to our metro stop) and then another 20 trying to find and open the door.  We were on the top floor of the building, and we forgot that in Europe and in the U.K., building floors are measured with the ground floor not counted as the first floor, as it usually is in the States.  So in America, the first floor is the ground floor, but over here, the first floor is actually what would be the second floor.  Because we did not remember this, we miscounted the floors and fumbled at people’s keyholes on the floor below us until we realized it was not our floor.  The door was very difficult to open, you had to pull the door in a series of intervals while you were turning the key, which took us a while to find out, but we finally made it in and crashed around 1 in the morning.    

At that point I was not impressed with Paris whatsoever, and was wondering why on earth I would have wanted to come to this city.  Luckily, the next few days completely changed my mind.