Gadling

My favorite "worst" travel story comes from Paris. A Canadian friend and I had spent three months on a study abroad in France, and finished up with a few weeks in Great Britain. We came back to Paris for the last night of our trip, to catch a CDG flight back to North America the next morning.

While every detail of our trip had been meticulously
planned, somehow this last night escaped our attention and we found ourselves homeless. Since it was a warm night in June, we figured we'd be fine. We'd heard that the train stations stayed open all night, so we locked our bags in a locker (which we would not be able to access until the next morning) at Gare du Nord, and after a midnight stroll through our favorite parts of Paris, settled in on benches near the tracks. Well, we were awfully surprised a few hours later to find that Gare du Nord CLOSES overnight, and some very large, slavering dogs had been called in to inform us of this fact.

Now we were truly homeless, and had no friends in town we could call on, and since almost everything we had was still locked in the train station, trying to find a hotel would be an act of total futility. A brief period of hyperventilating panic gave way to resignation, and in the true Les Miserables tradition, found an alcove off one of the streets to curl up in. At 2am in one of the less savory districts of Paris, we felt like orphans.

We were not to be left alone, however. A few minutes later, a short Frenchman shuffled up to us, and in very slurred French asked if he could sit with us. My friend, who was very conveniently pretending to be asleep, forfeited her right to refuse and my own language abilities had suddenly deserted me. So down he sat. His name was Bern, and he told us he was a horse jockey who'd missed his train to Lyon for a match. I believed him only because he smelled so strongly of horse. Luckily, he was too sloshed to be dangerous, and he promptly fell asleep on a cardboard box. We were also joined by Danny, a Swedish Spanish teacher who was on his way to his girlfriend in Spain. He and I had a very good conversation about the subtleties of musical theater variations in the US and in Europe, and I soon became so comfortable that I stopped clutching the swiss army knife I keep in my purse for bottle opening and nail trimming!

Alas, this peace was not to last, as one more man came to join the party. This one came from a group of young adolescent men we'd been watching down on the corner, and apparently wanted us to all join the fun. His French was strangely accented (like French ebonics almost) and since our Frenchman Bern was still asleep, the Swede spoke no French, and my friend was once again pretending unconsciousness, it was up to me to deal with this. I, of course, had no idea what he was saying. For all I know, he could have been trying to mug us. He got more and more agitated as I played dumb, and eventually flipped up his t-shirt to show us the pistol he had stuck in the waist of his jeans.

Now, I've always felt safer in Paris than in most American cities, so my first instinct was to laugh. I restrained this mad urge, and continued playing idiot American. Danny's eyes were huge and focused on my feet. I finally stopped talking and just stared this wannabe gangster down. (Oh, to be 19 and stupid again.) Frustrated, he moseyed back to his buddies on the corner, where we he heard shouts and laughter. In concerted motion, Danny lifted Bern, I grabbed P., and we high-tailed it around the block to find a 24-hour cafe. This cafe closed at about 3:30 am (truly French), so we found another one, and when that closed at 5am, we went to hang out with the guys loading newspaper boxes at the train station. Finally we made it back into Gare du Nord, boarded our train, made it onto the plane and back to the US. My bag burst in transit and my family forgot to come pick me up, but that's another story entirely...

I still feel safer in Paris than I do in Washington, DC.

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