So Billy Elliot was amazing! The boy who played Billy was incredibly talented and very fun to watch. What a dancer this kid was! I really hope he has a future in theater. Even though Mallory isn’t a huge musical fan she still seemed to enjoy the show. After the show we hopped on the tube and went back to the hotel. By the time we got back it was around midnight. We very quietly finished our packing and were lucky enough to get to bed around 1am before we had to get up at 3:15am to catch our 5:25am train to Paris. Well I had planned the whole route out via bus because the tube didn’t run that early. We got on our first bus at the right time and made it to our switch point without a hitch. The problem started when we got off our first bus and couldn’t find the stop for our second bus. Once we realized where the stop was, the bus was passing us and we missed it. We ended up waiting for about a half hour before the next bus arrived to take us to St. Pancras station. Let me just say…I planned this journey with extra time just in case something like this happened, so it’s not like I was cutting it close. Anyway, our second bus trip took 12 minutes but stopped outside Kings Cross Station and not St. Pancras International. So imagine Mallory and me literally running around London with giant backpacks (both of us almost taking nose dives into the pavement at some point) at 5am having no clue which direction to go, it was incredibly funny looking back on it now. (Stress: looking back on it)
So we make it onto the train and lug our packs to their holding area and collapsed into our seats. The train pulls out of the station at EXACTLY its departure time. I’m just happy that Jen was in charge of our wake-up and transportation schedule that morning! We saw a beautiful amazing sunrise over the green rolling hills of central-southern England before we lapsed into the semi-coma that only a four AM marathon can induce. (Did I mention that we got into our seats with FOUR MINUTES TO SPARE! Seriously. I can’t even…it was ridiculous. Anyway…) We woke up as the train was readying itself for our Gare d’Nord arrival. And we continued waking up during the 25min slow down (to a snail’s pace) pull in to the station. After we got off the train, Jen immediately announced that we had to find a park (Sounds romantic and lovely; but wait--) because she needed to sleep, and anywhere would do. So we pulled out our map to attempt to find a park…so that Jen could go to sleep. Upon pulling out our map, we were immediately approached by a French tween girl gesturing at a clipboard. She wanted us to sign our information to the deaf and mute children of France mailing list or something. Jen had the pen in her hand and was confusedly staring into the girl’s adorable mute face when an old bald Frenchmen came up to us shaking his finger. First he shook it at the tween girl, then at us, then at us at the tween girl, aaand we realize that we were about to have our identities stolen. So we thank him (kind of) and apologetically/confusedly walk away from the girl who was apparently NOT mute, because she turned to scold the old man for foiling her plans. (Making her sound like an evil genius, now, but at the time the names on the list were photocopied and these kids are at every subway station for a tourist attraction in all of France…that was definitely more than one run-on sentence. But hopefully you were able to follow. Apologies.) A nice black man on the street told us how to get to the park, so we made our way over there. I pulled out Atlas Shrugged and Jen rested her head in my lap and stretched out on one of the park’s benches. About ten minutes later, the first black nanny and child arrived in the park to play. Within 20 minutes we were overrun. Jen and I had a nice time watching the children mess with one another, but eventually decided to go back to a McDonalds we had seen near the train station. From there we used the internet to figure out how to get to our hotel and were easily able to navigate the subway stops to the area of the Hotel Comete. We got off the subway at the Jaures metro stop which is right on a canal. We tried to follow the addresses in the area to the hotel, but soon sat down, again, to rest on some benches in the sun and to take in the gorgeous day. When we got our bearings we realized that we had gone in the wrong direction. So we headed back up the street and found our hotel (right next door to ANOTHER McDonalds! Magnifique!) My 13-years of Spanglish finally paid off fore I was able to check us into our hotel in my mangled dialect. The lovely madame who owns the hotel only speaks French, Italian, and Spanish, so we didn’t have much to work with, but we adapted. We checked at about 1 o’clock and slept for the next few hours. We had a good time walking around the neighborhood and having our first dinner in Paris from one of the bakery/sandwich shops that are everywhere in this neighborhood. We ate near the water as the sun was going down and it was beautiful.
To Be Continued…
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