Paris during Toussaint (All Saints' Day): Procrastination

Okay! Here is what you have all been waiting for! A day by day account of our trip to/in Paris! Since some of us (I'm not going to mention any names here) are too busy lesson planning to write a post on Paris, I have decided to pick up the slack so that all of our avid readers will be filled with the joy of our news.

Day 1: We are never on time
Our journey began on Monday 24 October, but we had actually spent the last two days (skipping church included) trying to plan this blasted adventure. Note to self: Never, ever, wait until two days before leaving for vacation to try to plan it, especially not a vacation to Paris (unless you are going to Paris, TX, in which case you don't need to plan anything at all). It could probably go unmentioned that we were up late on Sunday night packing and whatnot, so we decided to skip the early train (around 10:30) and take the next one (12:30). Because we were going to be taking a big suitcase, we wanted to catch the bus to the Gare. Well, thank you public transportation, the only bus options would either put us at the Gare at 12:26, or at 11:20. Knowing we needed more than four minutes to buy our tickets (again a problem of not preparing ahead) we were forced to take the bus that would make us sit at the tiny Gare for one long hour.

Good news and bad news. Good news first. We actually did not have to wait at the Gare for more than 15 minutes. Bad news. We didn't have to wait long because we missed the bus and had to walk to the Gare. Luckily it was freezing outside so by the time we got to the Gare we were only sweating a little bit (and by we I mean Derek because he was being so sweet to carry the huge suitcase all the way).

How much did the train tickets cost? How was the train ride?  These are two very good questions to which I no longer remember the answer. My next memory of the trip is watching (and laughing to myself) while Derek struggled to carry the suitcase up and down all the steps in the metro stations just to get to the hotel and realize he would have to carry it up four flights of stairs.

Poor chap. Once we checked into the hotel, freshened up a bit, and saw that our hotel was not half as bad and nasty as we had been expecting, we headed out to visit the tourist office and find dinner!  At the tourist office, we picked up loads of brochures (mostly for events that we were too poor to attend but looked cool) and bought two 4-day museum passes which would get us into many museums, etc. for free.  It was also on this night that we discovered it is both a blessing and a curse that restaurants are required to post their menu outside. It is a blessing because you can choose a place that has decent options and not be caught off guard. It is a curse because it is quite possible that we are the slowest decision makers on earth. So we spent at least an hour checking out the menus/trying to decide on a place to eat, and an equal amount of time eating/waiting for the waiter to bring us the check. But THEN we made one of the quickest and easiest decisions we have ever made:

  

Compared to Chaumont (which has two super crappy theaters owned by the same guy and which we've never been to), Paris is like the movie theater capital of the world.  Actually, compared to anywhere it is.  There are movie theaters EVERYWHERE.  But since we just happened to be by this particular one, we decided to go there.  It was sort of a combination between old-timey classy with red carpets and relatively crappy.  But, we did get some M&Ms so it was okay (popcorn can be hard to come by in French theaters, oddly enough). For the record, this was a GREAT movie. I don't think it is in America, though. But you should request it at the local theater! After the movie, we returned to the hotel. As Derek was about to set the alarm on his phone for the next morning, he realized that he did not have it. Where could it be? Probably at the movie theater...