Paris! Oh, Paris! We hear about it since our childhood. It's fancy to go to Paris. You can say that to impress other people. You can say "Hey, I bought this in Paris" and have everyone WOWed. It looks like a dream..................................................until you get here LOL
We arrived at Orly airport after the Airport Police episode. Right at the airport there were some army guys walking around with riffles. Scary!
We headed over to buy tickets for the airport-city shuttle. After the shuttle we arrive at Anthony RER station where you move over to RER, that's where you use your ticket as there are turnstile gates. However our French friends are not so fond of it as about 15 people jumped over it and didn't pay the ticket. LOL. That does not happen even here in Brazil. It was like the 50m with obstacles in the Olympics.
We head over to our hotel near the Simplon station. It's an Arabic-Turkish neighbourhood which means Donner Kebab is readily available as are Kouchery and Falafel.
We need to handle checkin with the receptionist who does not speak English. My French is so lame at this point that when I want to apologize I say "Excuse me". I'm mentally blocked. It still works and after some hand gestures and fingers pointing on papers everything works.
We are back in the subway direction Eiffel Tower. We want to seize as it has stopped raining and it will probably rain soon again.
In the subway, a group of Italians enter the wagon. They are obviously loud and the French are looking at them with dismissive looks. A few stations later the wagon is crammed full of people. (See Sao Paulo people, even Paris subway is crowdy). It's hard even to get out of the wagon, lot's of pushing are needed.
A few more stations and the little French girl in the middle of the Italians wants to go off. She starts screaming "La Porte, La Porte"so people can open the way for her to leave. However this Italian old woman grabs her and will not let her go, screaming something. This French girl jumps in the action and starts screaming obscenities in French at her. Only then I notice she tried to pickpocket the old Italian's man wallet. She's using the urgency to leave the train as strategy so people would not notice it. It's incredible to think how quick the old Italian lady was on grabbing her. And when the 6 foot 200 pounds French lady jumped in the action the little pickpocketing girl was unable to complete her plan. She had to stay there hearing all sorts of bad things from the French lady and hope she didn't get lynched. Finally she's let go on the next station with empty hands. She's now probably thinking on how to improve her pickpocketing abilities.
That's Paris my friends. Dirty, smelly, crowdy, stressed people, pickpockets. Just like Sao Paulo. However, the crime rates are much lower. Interesting!
All in all it's still beatiful. Just not a pure angel on a pedestal as people try to make it look like :)
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