This is such a long story. First of all - why were we back in Paris - a city we had tried to leave for so long the week before, but kept on having challenges getting train tickets? Second, now that we were back in Paris - how did we end up homeless? First things first - why were we back in Paris. Well to get from Barcelona to our next stop, Rome, we had to travel through Paris. Unfortunately the connection was not great. As such we would get into Paris at 5pm but our next train to Rome would leave at 7am. I decided that booking a hostel would not make any sense. Paris is expensive - we would pay loads to stay in the city. Our next option would be Chelles - the far off godforsaken town we stayed in last time. The same town that had no taxis and required a half hour walk with our backpacks to get to the apartment.....It was a no-brainer - too much effort for just one night of sleep. I decided we would sleep at the train station - on our backpacks.....It seemed like a grand plan, until.......
So we got to Paris at 5pm, managed to book all our remaining tickets - Rome, Geneva, Amsterdam. We were happy - this time Paris was going to be a breeze. We had our tickets out of the city - what's the worst thing that could happen. We went to the Eiffel tower, took pictures with giant teddy bears close to the tower and finally headed back to the train station around 9/10pm to sleep....Or so we thought.
Total balaa! The first signs of problems was the closed toilets. Where did they expect us to go pee in the middle of the night? Ah well, we will survive. We set our bags down - everyone picking a nice wall to sleep against. Then we saw an official looking person say something to other tourists who seemed to have the same plan as us. They stood up and carried their bags. Uh oh! They got to us and the message was loud and clear. "You need to leave the train station. We are closing for the night." Excuse me? What the hell type of regional train station closes for the night? Till today I think this is intentionally done to prevent people from sleeping at the train station.
What to do.....We are homeless and sleepy. You do recall the activities of our previous night in Barcelona. The BARacuda and I partied till morning then caught the train to Paris. We needed sleep. We went to a part of town that had a bar that promised to stay open till 5am.....Good, then we would only have 2 hours to kill before our next train. We got into the bar. We were a sight. We were falling asleep on the table. "Wake up! They will kick us out thinking we're drunk." "Ok, what do we do to stay awake?" "Let's play cards." That was the sorriest game of cards ever played. "Oh, that's a 5 of spades? I thought it was a Queen of hearts." People were struggling.
Finally the light at the end of the tunnel came in the form of a little Nepali bartender who liked The Reluctant. He started getting us all shots on the house - now that kept us up:-) Finally at 5am, we dragged our exhausted feet out of the bar and into the train station.
Goodbye Paris!