So on this Tuesday morning, I woke up early to go fetch my friend Jack from the train station. I left myself plenty of time to stop by the bakery (friends who visit me in France get a complimentary pain au chocolat), take the 45 minute metro ride, and find the platform to be there when his train arrived.
Little did I know, le gare du nord is a maze of underground tunnels and misleading signs when you're coming from the metro station. I got off the metro and started following the signs to le gare when I ran into another line of ticket-takers. I had already swiped my ticket to get on the metro, so I thought those tickets must have been for the RER train or another line. Plan B brought me up the escalator and into the gray morning (note the weather change...). I was kind of just going with what I remembered seeing on maps and what I thought to be North and South when I picked which direction to start walking.
As it would happen, my often-excellent sense of direction was spot on and I made it to le gare in about three minutes. Inside, I started following the signs to les grandes lignes where my friend's train would come in. This sounds simple enough but for the fact that sometimes the signs would just disappear and you would have no idea whether to go up, down, left, right, forward, backward, diagonal, or what have you. At one point I was back in the metro and was forced to use a metro ticket to follow the grandes lignes signs.
Goodness gracious, Paris.
Naturally, as I fumbled around with escalators and hallways, I started imagining the worst. I wasn't sure that my friend would have a working cellphone and I wasn't even sure that he had put my number in his phone. What would happen if he got off the train and couldn't find me? How would we find each other? (Kathleen, stop freaking out.)
Eventually I resurfaced, found the platform, and bought some hot chocolate to hand to my sleep-deprived friend as he got off the train. And we had quite the lovely day (despite the pouring rain...)
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| Jack and me at Versailles! (in the rain) |
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| Elyse and I doing a myspace style photo in the Hall of Mirrors |
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| Slap happy after being so cold and wet... |
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| And then it turned into a beautiful evening |
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| Our view from the top of the arc de triomphe |
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