Halloween in Paris

We left for paris at noon on our second wedding anniversary with a change of clothes, a map of the city, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a few other essentials in our backpacks. A light rain fogged my glasses as we rode the 4.5 kilometers to the train station in Kortrijk, but some mildly inclement weather could not dampen my enthusiasm for our first ever trip to Paris! An hour layover in Lille, FR only heightened the anticipation.

By the time the train disgorged us into one of the busiest train stations in europe, Paris Nord, I was grabbing Travis' arm in excitement. The loudspeaker let forth a stream of completely incomprehensible syllables. Travis turned to me with a look of sincere culture shock in his eyes and said, "I don't know any French. You are going to take it from here, okay?"
Sometime in the last century, in the era when only a few people in Seattle had heard of that band named Nirvana, I took two years of high school French. Off the top of my head, I could remember how to count to three, the word for bakery, and the phrase, "Je ne parle pas Francais". I nodded.
"Okay!"
My co-workers in California got me a European phrase book as a going away present, and I had carefully reviewed the French section ten minutes before we got off the train.

The cheapest place we could find at short notice was the Hotel des Batignolle, in the northern most section of our map of the city. To get there from the train station, we would need to take the subway, which in Paris is called the Metro. To get into the train station, you already need to have a ticket. Hmmm. We looked around, and there was a machine on the wall. Travis and I figured out how to get it to display in English, and bought ten tickets for the Metro, figuring we would need a bunch to get around. I already knew we needed the #2 line, and that the trains are listed by the last station in their route, so we looked up on the handy map on the wall, and found that we needed the #2 line towards Porte Dauphine. Sure enough, that took us directly to the Rome stop. It seemed amazing, ten minutes in the city, and we had already figured out how to get around!

At the desk of the Hotel des Batignolle, I approached the desk clerk and tried, "J'ai reserve" (picture accent marks over the first and third e's in 'reserve'). The desk clerk gave us a smile of amusement and said, "And what is your name?"

Next: The Eiffel tower