A semester in Espana: Paris, day one: Traveling to Paris

This weekend (Thursday night thru Sunday) I went to Paris, France for the first time ever. Tyler and I got to our hotel first on thursday night and Samantha would be coming on Friday because she booked a flight with a different airline. Our flight came in at 10ish and we had no idea how to get to the hotel. We tried to get a metro ticket, but when we got to the metro station at the airport they kept making announcements about the metro closing soon and we were nervous and didn’t want to get trapped somewhere so we ended up just taking a taxi. In retrospect I’m really glad we did because even if we did take the metro it was very dark and our taxi driver even had a hard time finding the hotel.

I booked the hotel and I had read that it was in a new area but it had really good reviews and was relatively inexpensive so I thought it should be fine (it ended up being a really nice place and our room came with dishes, a dishwasher, a stove and a microwave plus a heated towel rack and had lovely receptionists’ at the front desk but it proved to be very difficult to get there for both Tyler and I and Samantha). When we got to the hotel it was close to 11 pm and Tyler and I were both so hungry. We had gone straight to the airport from school and neither of us had really eaten dinner. We were hoping we could find something by the hotel so we asked the receptionist. He told us he could order us food but we were told him that was ok, because we thought it might be easier to just go out and get something. We ended up wandering to this bar 3 or 4 blocks from our hotel and asked some locals if they knew where a McDonald’s was. They pointed down the street to the right and said it was just passed three round-about. About two miles and at least an hour of walking later, we found no McDonald’s and were still very hungry and I was pretty maxed out on walking and limping badly.

By now it was about 12:45/1amish and we had walked back to the direction of the hotel. We decided to walk in the opposite direction just to see if we went the wrong way and sure enough, there was a freaking McDonald’s like 4 blocks in the opposite direction from our hotel. We were both so mad, and it was closed so we were depressed. We then just walked back to the hotel told the receptionist our story and he asked us again if we wanted to order food from this company. The first time when we said no we were just confused because we though he said it closed at 11pm and it was just after 11 when we first got there. The receptionist clarified though and said that this company would deliver until 3 am right to the hotel. So we were both kicking our selves for not doing that right off the bat. We ordered food right then and there and he said it would take about 30 minutes and he would call our room when it got here.

So we went up to the room, changed, watched T.V. and got settled and waited for 45/50 mins. It would about 2 am when we decided to go back down there and figure out what was going on. Before we got down there Tyler and I both agreed that if it wasn’t coming we would just go to bed hungry. We were both more tired than hungry anyways so we didn’t want to stay up any later just to eat. The receptionist said he’d call again for us and the food place said our food would arrive in another 15 minutes if we still wanted it and we told him it was ok.

We were starting to walk towards the elevator to just go upstairs and back to bed when the front desk receptionist stopped us and told us to wait and he went to a little room on the side. Tyler and I were both very confused but we waited. When he came back he had a plastic bag and said there were croissants from tomorrow’s breakfast and his own cheeseburger that we could have to eat because he felt bad for us. It was so nice we were both embarrassed. We told him we would be ok without food tonight and that he could keep it, even though it was the nicest gesture, but he insisted so we took it. That was my first experience with french people and he was so nice. The sterotype of them being mean, which I was warned of by many people, turned out not to be true.