Tom and I stayed in Paris for a few nights earlier this year. We stayed in a self contained apartment in the Opera district.
It was great. Finding it was not.
Traveling can be stressful. It is difficult to find your way around in a new place when none of the signs are in your language. It is even more difficult when you don't have the correct address.
I had booked our accommodation on the internet before we left home and had the details with me. Unfortunately I didn't really pay much attention to them before we left. I knew we needed to go to a street called Bergere which was near the Grand Boulevards metro station.
Tom and I arrived by plane from Edinburgh. We had been up very early in the morning to travel to Edinburgh to catch our plane to Paris, so even before we started our travel we were tired. We had a good flight from Edinburgh to Paris and after getting our luggage from the carosel we headed to the train station to find a train.
On the way to the train station I spotted a bus service that went to the Opera district, so we hoped on hoping it would take us close to where we wanted to go. It dropped us off about 1 kilometre from the station we were after and we walked from there, daypacks on and suitcases in tow.
Once we got to the station we were after I took out our maps. I located Rue de Bergere and happily we were just nearby. So I set off to look for the apartment. By this time we were exhausted. It was late in the afternoon and we had been up since before the sun was. I had been wearing my daypack which weighed about 12 kilos and pulling my suitcase which weighed about 20.
We had some trouble locating the apartment. When we reached here
Tom and I disagreed on what number we were looking for on Rue de Bergere which lead to this conversation
Me: (with tone) We are after number 6 Tom. There is no number six here.
Tom: No. We want number 5.
Me: (loudly) No. 6. I am sure it is 6.
Tom: No it is definitely 5.
Me: (yelling) I don't f*&king care what it is! There is no number 5 or number 6 on this street and we are completely f*&king lost!
Yes. That right. I had a tantrum on Rue de Bergere in Paris. I swore (and I very very rarely swear) at my poor husband who was completely correct. We were after number 5.
The problem was that we were not after Rue de Bergere. We were after Cite de Bergere. Which we discovered after looking at the travel docs again.
This was not good. I had no idea where Cite de Bergere was. None of my maps were detailed enough to include it. I began to think that maybe we were in completely the wrong district. Would I have to drag my suitcase and my tired self across to the other side of town?
After the exchange of a few more curt words, Tom bravely asked direction from a lady in a hotel and she said
"Oui, Oui, Oui, a gauche, a gauche, a droite"
which meant - Yes you stupid Australian Tourist can't you see you are right near that street. You just need to go left, left and then right.
So when I had had my explosion at Tom we were approximately 50 meters from where we wanted to be. As you can see on the below picture. The little man is where we were arguing and Cite de Bergere is the lane nearby
..que the James Bond music...
So we found the apartment building. The next hurdle (apart from not killing each other before we had a shower and a rest) was to get into the building.
Now when I had booked our accommodation I had been given a code into the building. We had the code. We entered the code. The code got us into the first door of the building. Then we entered a second code to get us through the second door of the building.
The number was not 007 - but it should have been.
Once inside the second "chamber" we turned left and on the wall was a safe. We entered a third code into the safe and it opened to reveal an envelope with our name on it. In the envelope was our room key.
So we had the key and the note attached told us that we were in room 3. We located room 3, used the key successfully to get into the apartment and collapsed on the bed.
Ah Paris in the springtime....so romantic
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