"That will cost about £300."
I stared at her, incredulous.
"Each?" I asked.
"Each."
"Um, we're going to go think about it." I smiled.
Bullshit we were going to go think about it.
We were standing in the middle of London Waterloo train station, trying to get from London to Paris on Eurostar that afternoon. For anyone not up on currency exchanges, £300 is about $617 Canadian.
"So, what do we do now?" asked Meghan, looking at me with eyes of a child looking to a teacher or parent to answer all their questions about the complexities and mysteries of life.
"How the eff should I know?" I thought.
"We´ll figure it out." I said.
And we did. By noon we were Dover-bound, where we would catch a ferry to Calais, and with with luck, catch the last train out of Calais to Lille, and then on to Paris. It was a hectic day, but the beaches of Dover seemed to calm Meghan down quite a bit, and a drink and a good book on the hour and a half crossing to France had a similar effect on me.
Even though we nearly missed the last train of the night in Calais and had to sit around in the train station in Lille for a couple hours, traveling went pretty wel. Pretty well, that is until we started looking for our hostel. See, European cities have this fun little habit of not putting up street signs at each corner, and so a visitor gets to guess which street he or she is on. To make matters worse, the directions that I had were very basic, telling me that the hostel was on a street just off 'Clichy'. And so, in search of the this elusive 'Clichy' we emerged from the 'Place de Clichy' subway station, which, as it turns out, comes out on the intersection of the 'Rue de Clichy', 'Avenue de Clichy', with 'Boulevard de Clichy' interseting about 100m up the street. Further up 'Rue de Clichy' is a side street called 'Passage de Clichy' and further still is the 'Quai de Clichy'. Over the next hour or so my map and I had a few choice words until I threw it away in disgust. Just then a friendly French couple stopped and tried to help. The guy, who had seen the Canadian flags on our backpacks, told us that he had spent some time in Canada (well, just Toronto) and figured he'd give us a hand. He pointed us down one of the Clichys that we had already walked down twice, and by 0:30, we were in our room at the El Dorado Hotel.
Other than being a complete bitch to find, El Dorado was an amazing bohemian four-story hostel on a pituresque Parisien side street, with a colourful victorian staircase, incredible rooms, and the best showers ever. Within a few minutes of arriving, we had already decided to extend our stay by a night.
The next morning (Tuesday), after sleeping a little late, we did the typical tour of Paris, taking in l'Arc de Triumph, and Notre Dame Cathedral in the morning. In the afternoon we discovered that the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays (which I was real thrilled about) and then, of course, we went to take the requisite look at the Eiffel Tower. Once again, jumping from sight to sight almost seemed like we were cheating the city's history and culture, but I slept off the guilt with an evening nap, and then, paying homage to Parisien culture, we had dinner at an unreal restaurant. It was, and remains, one of the best meals I have ever had. With a price to match.
The next day we hopped on a train to Belgium, and as I turned on my camera to check out my pictures form the last few stops, I found out that they were all deleted by a memory card error. Yay! And that pretty much set my mood for that day.
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