We arrive at paris with next to no money and no working credit cards. I try to buy metro tickets and it denies my card (I though I’d try) so I pull out the remaining money I had and purchase tickets. We ride the metro to the Opera stop. When I reserved the hotel I printed the map that the hotel had on it’s site. The opera stop was the only one on there which made me think the hotel was near the Opera which would be a new area for us and exciting. We follow the map and walk past the Opera, past Galleries Lafayette, and walk for about another 30 minutes. We eventually find the hotel at the base of Montmartre. This is the area where the Amelie movie so a lot of Americans want to stay there. Moulin Rouge is also in this area. The reality is it’s full of sex shops, tatoo parlours and dance clubs. The main street is Pigalle which the American soldiers from WWII nicknamed “Pig Alley” because of it. This is basically the red light district. The hotel room was actually two rooms connected and it cost us $140 per night. Had I known it was in Pigalle I wouldn’t have reserved it…. Lesson learned. They didnt ask for money so we were thankful to even have it. It had Internet in the “lobby” which was an 8 by 8 room that included the reception desk and the stairs which tells you how much room was left for the Internet. The price was 8 euros per hour which was hiway robbery but less than a metro ticket to a better one.
The following day we head for the Internet cafe to see if we can resolve anything. The problem with the time zones is people at home won’t answer the phone until 6:00pm our time. I check my bank balance and the money I took out came out of an account with 2 dollars. Again don’t complain when you get blood from a turnip. The Skype voice quality was so poor that I couldn’t call the bank so I called my Mom and she went down there to talk to them. They turned my cards back on (again) and we had access to money so we decided to have some good food - Dominos! When we stayed in Paris for the month we went to Dominos several times and bought pizza. Our favorite thing to do was to take our pizza to the Champs de Mars and eat it while waiting for the Eiffle tower to light up. We didn’t wait that long this time but it sure was nice to have some good pizza. Before you start thinking about that statement let me explain about Dominos. Dominos in France is way better than Dominos here. In 5 years I’ve only eaten at Dominos twice in the states. The Paris Dominos has BBQ pizza (with hot dog like things on it) and hot wings, ice cream etc.. just like Papa Johns here. I don’t know why they don’t do that in the states but at home they only have about 8 basic ingredients and one sauce - not very interesting. The next day my cards get turned back on, we pay for our room and head for the Internet cafe again, this time to book a room in Provence. We were about 2 days behind schedule and needed to move on or we’d have to cut out cities. We looked at the price of train tickets to Provence ($200) and our money ($250) and decided we had no other choice but to stay in Paris for another day. So far our stay in Paris had not been very good. I can see why people could come here and have a horrible time and hate Paris. Paris needs to be done right in order to be enjoyed. I found a quad room west of Monparnasse which is really quite far from anything but since we’d spent so much time in Paris already we weren’t really there for touristy reasons. We rode the metro there and checked in. The area was really nice and resembled the 7th near the Eiffle tower quite a lot. We liked this area and there wasn’t a single tourist in sight. There were clothes shops, boulangeries, patisseries, boucheries etc.. just like everywhere else but they were filled with French people! This was a nice breath of fresh air. If someone wanted to just experience Parisian life without seeing landmarks this would be a great place to do it. Wanting more great food we made the long trek to the Dominoes again and ate it on the Champs de Mars. I got paid from one of the colleges that day so we had money for train tickets to Provence. Since we had wasted so much time waiting for money we couldn’t spend the time in Provence that I wanted. Originally we had planned on seeing Avignon, Arles, Marseille and Aix en Provence. Since we only had two days to use I decided to just go to Aix.