London to Paris

Being the tourists that we are, we had to take the Eurostar from London to Paris. That and the fact we had so much luggage that flying would be ludicrously expensive. We cleverly booked a taxi to take us to St Pancras station so we toured the road in style. On the way we passed through another part of Hyde Park and it was there that I discovered my phone now has the capability to take time-lapse videos. Our trip has gone up a level in intensity since then :) Lucky for you lovely people I couldn't figure out how to upload them here or you would be overwhelmed with high speed adventures any second. 

All aboard!

Excellent advertising in London St Pancras station

We bustled into the station with plenty of time and headed straight through the x-ray and passport checks before thinking about what we were doing. Before we knew it we were in what looked surprisingly like any other departure lounge in the history of the world which was bad news for our hungry tummies. We had been looking forward to browsing around the station kiosks and gift shops but were met instead with one cafe with triple the prices than outside of the security doors. C'est la vie, we were there and so made ourselves comfortable and enjoyed an expensive breakfast. Boarding eventually commenced and thus our departure from the Motherland. The train was only about half full so we had a table and the two seats opposite us free which gave Adam some room to play.

Did I mention that Adam loves trains? Like, loves them. He was so excited when he was given this toy train by a station attendant that he played with it well into our Paris adventure. Also starring in the above photo is the robot we bought from Selfridges; official name: Rodot. 

Eurostar selfie

The trip was smooth and easy with no hassles or dramas but I read in the news a couple of days later that one of the Eurostar services on our route had been stopped for nine hours just the week before we travelled. Hisham and I were both very happy that we didn't know of this while we were on the train! It was beautiful flying through the English and French countrysides and seeing all of the little cottages and villages along the way. There were so many tunnels in England that it wasn't until we were half way under the English Channel that we realised where we were. We both expected it to look more under-the-sea-like and official but it was just a regular train tunnel and kind of boring to be honest.

Paris Gare du Nord

We arrived to Paris in the mid-afternoon and it was there that the real adventure began. This photo, to preface the next story, is an attempt to show how many bags we had. I don't know about you but that looks like a regular amount of luggage to me. I assure that it was not. We have maybe twice as much as we should and our shoulders felt the strain of the extra weight every single time we moved anywhere. I know I have mentioned this before but it was such a major fail that Hisham and I discuss it regularly so you can read about it regularly too ;)

I had read multiple accounts of taxis in Paris and was well aware that you should only ever take taxis with official signage so we headed outside to the ranks. We asked one Parisian gentleman on our way and he said it could be as much as seventy euros to get to our apparently-ages-away destination. Near the exit doors of the station we were accosted by a man offering us a taxi for a fixed price - not done in Paris - which was much lower than the estimate the Parisian offered, and so after some bargaining we took it. Fifty euros later* we arrived at our destination and began the trek up four flights of steps with our mountain of belongings. This was happily for us the last time we would need to do so alone because we were meeting Hisham's sister and her family that evening.

*While preparing for the next leg of our trip I found a website which calculates taxi fares around the world that said our taxi (if we had taken an official one) should have only been about twenty euros. I'm not sure that would have been quite correct either considering it's a forty minute drive but we felt pretty duped when we found that out.

The apartment was amazing. It looked exactly as it was presented in the photos on AirBnB which is what we had envisioned a French apartment should like. It had polished wooden floors, antique style furniture, flourishing pot plants, red couches, black and white tiled kitchen and bathroom, and a gorgeous view out to a park and the surrounding neighbourhood. Right around the corner from the house were a grocery store and boulangerie (bakery, bread and pastry shop) with fresh and delicious sweets galore, and our route to the train station was through town with all of the traditional local French shops - the butchery, the seafood shop, the bakery, the delicatessen, the grocer, the leather shop, and even a Christmas tree stall. The street was cobbled and there were Christmas decorations up which twinkled after dark. To top it all off, the local butcher, pizza place and hot chicken shop were all halal. It was a dream house for our Paris stay.

It wasn't long after we had arrived and settled ourselves in that we realised we would need to leave soon to pick up Hiam and her family. The almighty Google and the French version of the Maxx website estimated it would be about a seventy minute trip out to the airport with four different trains to catch. The main stations in Paris are actually usually two or three or four stations joined together so we had a lot of walking between but within stations as well, and the trip ended up taking us more than two hours!

This is us on train #3. Adam had just woken up from a ridiculously delayed, ridiculously long nap, and Hisham was wishing he was having his own time of zzzzs. The last train we caught was the airport shuttle and it is a driverless train. There are only two carriages and they both have windows at the ends so you can see it hurtling down the tracks. While we were on it I couldn't help but think of movies like Final Destination and every single train crash / murder on a train movie ever made. It stopped at the first terminal and all the other passengers got off leaving Hisham, Adam and I all alone on the train, speeding through the night. I am glad I don't watch horror movies because my imagination was running wild enough as it was. Am I managing to communicate effectively how terrifying I found this experience? Not one I would like to repeat, despite how harmless and mundane it really was.

Here's a Paris train sign to clear those horrible thoughts from your mind. I like to imagine the guy in the green pic is saying, "Dude! Where the heck is your arm?!"

Anyway, we arrived safely (of course) and then wandered through the terminal until we found our recent arrivals. Hisham and I had decided it wasn't worth the time or effort involved to take them home by the same route so we found a taxi instead - a proper one with a meter this time - and headed home that way. The return trip only took about 45 minutes and cost us seventy euro. It would have been ninety to take everybody on the train so this was a win win win situation. We exerted the last of our energy trekking up the four flights of stairs and finally it was time for everybody to relax and have a bit of a catch up.

Let the exploration of Paris commence..