Arriving in Paris

Ben and I decided that since we didn't have work Friday we would leave Thursday evening so we could wake up in Paris. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 8:30pm, land at 10:30pm which would give us an hour and a half to get into the city, find our hotel and check in by midnight, the latest you can check in. There was a train from the airport that connected to the metro line we needed to get to our hotel. We printed off our plane tickets, our google maps to the hotel and we were ready to go!

We get to the airport and as we are standing in line we start talking with a couple of girls behind us. Turns out that it is very likely that there will be a transportation strike when we get into Paris. Taxis are 125€ to get from the airport to Paris! So we really don't want to have to do that. We found out we were lucky our plane was even going though because there had been strikes at the Charles de Gaulle airport earlier in the week and no one was able to get to Paris. So at least we could still go!

We finally land in Paris only about 10 minutes late. Everyone is rushing off the plane trying to figure out transportation. We find where to buy tickets for the train and figure that if they are selling tickets the train must be running. We buy the tickets and head to the platform. It is blocked so we start to follow the crowd to...a bus. Ben and I were the last people admitted on that first bus and we head into Paris wondering why we bought train tickets if the bus was free. We keep checking the time and finally come to terms with the fact that we will not get to the hotel by midnight.

The bus ends up dropping us off at a train station that is running. It will take us to the metro station we need. Twenty minutes later the train finally arrives. We go one stop and then get off on the metro. There was a very nice French man who heard us talking about what line to get on and he gave us directions. We get off at the metro stop shown on our google map and start wondering around. We are on the right street but when we get to what we thought the building number was, there was no hotel sign and it was completely dark. I try buzzing a few random floors but there is no answer so we start to wander again.

This is one time where I definitely appreciated the late night life in Europe! Even though it is 12:30am, there are plenty of people out and about and plenty of bars, cafes and restaurants open. We go to a sandwich shop and I show them the address and say something like "Here?" In a mixture of broken English and French he tells us we need to keep walking in the direction we were first headed. Ben finally figured out what the problem was. When I had copied and pasted the address into google maps, google maps took the district number to be the building number. So we thought we were in building #19 when really it was district 19, building #188. We had a ways to go but at least now we knew where we were going!

We finally get to the hotel at 1am, check in and get in bed. Needless to say, we slept quite well that night.