After a 60 Euro cab ride (or $84 US dollars) from the airport, we arrive at our hotel around noon, Paris time. We are told that our hotel reservation doesn’t exist. After a thorough investigation, it is confirmed that the hotel has no vacancies, and none of the occupied rooms have our names associated to them. This is a first for me – not only have I never been to Paris, I’ve never arrived at a hotel in another continent and been told I don’t have a room. They were able to find us a room in their sister hotel, and guaranteed that we would have a room when we returned the morning after. So they graciously called us a cab and provided cab fare to another hotel, quite a distance away. Now Paris is made out of concentric rings. The center of Paris where all the touristy stuff is is referred to as Zone 1. The further out you are, the higher the number. We were in Zone 5. This is about a half hour away from the center of Paris by train. The sister hotel was also in Zone 5, a bit further North.
We check into the sister hotel without a hitch, but our room lacks hot water, and many of the surfaces seemed unfit for human contact. It will suffice for one night, but after losing five hours of time from NY, a cave and a pile of leaves would have done the job too. Not wanting to waste our first day, we gear up our tourist apparel and head to the lobby to get directions into the heart of Paris. To get to Zone 1, we need to take two trains. Fair enough. Except that we need another ten Euros for a taxi ride to the train station because it’s so far away. But it’s a better alternative than another 60 Euro for the same distance.
Two trains later, in the center of Paris, we get lost several times and I get pooped on by a fat Parisian pigeon. We had our first authentic crepe and learn how to say “water” and how smoking is as necessary for Parisians as food, oxygen, and wine. As the sun sets, we head back to the hotel via train, and back to our Metro stop. It’s night by the time we arrive, and at the taxi stand outside, there are no taxis. We wait, some taxis drive by, but do not stop. So we ask the friendly Metro station guard with his German Shepard in tow about “le taxi.” He speaks French. In French, we can say “taxi” and “water.” Through much gesturing, he is kind enough to help call a taxi for us. Seems like you can’t really hail a taxi outside of Paris – you have to call for one. In America, that’s better known as “car service.” After a few phone calls, he tells us all the taxi companies are closed. At this point, it’s 9:30 PM, and the taxi companies are closed. Que le hell? Another Frenchman walks by and tries to assist. He doesn’t speak English either. I’m frantically looking up every word I can possibly think of to help in my dictionary, but they’re speaking so fast, I can’t turn the pages before they’re on another subject (I think). This new person I notice has no thumbnail, as he holds our map, pointing in seemingly random directions. Which makes me wonder, how do you lose a thumbnail in Paris? Is he a member of the French Mafia? Did he cross someone in French black market tourist trading? He concludes the best option is to walk. I should clarify: Walk down the darkly lit streets in the suburbs of Paris when it took us 10 Euro to get there, which may have been about 5 miles. Then we had the idea to call the hotel. Since the hotel provided a taxi for us earlier, why couldn’t they do that now? Now right outside the Metro entrance was a newspaper stand closing for the night. The newsstand owner inside was kind enough to call the hotel for us with his phone, where the hotel tells him a taxi will come get us in 5 minutes.
Newsstand owner tells us to stand on the corner, in a highly visible area, as it seems like there is more of Paris’ less desirables roaming the streets now. The newsstand owner checks on us one last time after he closes the gate to his newsstand, and leaves with a wave via the Metro staircase where we exited from. After about 15 minutes, the man with no thumbnail comes back in a white car packed with his buddies, or the rest of the members of his tourist kidnapping ring, depending on how you look at it. The car slows to a halt in front of us, and the back door opens with him gesturing us to enter for a ride back to our hotel. Luckily, I’ve learned in the past to never accept rides from men without thumbnails, so we wisely said “no merci.”
Our five minutes are definitely up, and wifey spots newsstand owner coming back via car. He seems to have forgotten something and is unlocking the gate to his newsstand again. As he closes the gate the second time, he sees me, and asks “no taxi?” “No taxi” we reply. He looks at his watch, shakes his head, then points to his car. “Come.” Having very little choice, we consider the options (which really aren’t many), and walk with him to his car. Now he’s got all his nails intact, is alone, pretty old, and I think I can beat him in arm wrestling, so it’s probably a much safer bet than the man with no thumbnail and his Mafia friends, so we go ahead and pack into his little two door European automobile. The security guard with his dog walks by and gestures to me as if asking if I’m ok. I shrug my shoulders, because I really don’t know if I am ok. So he laughs, and waves au revoir. That may be the last person I see in Paris, so I wave good bye as well.
This newsstand owner is telling us in the car as he's driving that that area isn’t safe at night. “One man, one dog, no security.” (I would have replied “In New York, one person, in one bulletproof box, no dog, no security,” if I knew how to say that.) He ends up taking us on a pretty direct shot on the highway to our hotel, and as we exit his car with a lot of “merci’s,” I offer him 10 Euro, which he refuses. He cups his hands over his heart instead, which I assume meant that he wanted to do it out of the kindness of his heart. (That same gesture in NY means “heart attack.”)
So that’s how we spent our first night in Paris. If you do travel to this train stop and see the newsstand owner at the Emarainville RER stop on the "E" line, please buy something from him and send him regards from NY.
Also, from this experience alone, I would say Parisians are far from the unfriendly snobs they're often stereotyped to be. For the record, in our 6 days there, we were never treated rudely.
