Journey to Paris

Paris, France

23rd June 2003

Friday night I woke up quite tired from being up to late the night before. I got ready and headed to work. At the end of the day Anja picked me up and we drove home. Anja slept for a few hours while I played on the PC and made a few phone calls. Around 11:30 we got packed up and around midnight we headed out for our journey from Hannover to Paris.

The drive was nice, Germany gets much nicer the further west you go. We ended up driving through Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Köln and finally Aachen before crossing over into Belgium. There was quite a bit of road construction in Germany and the roads in Belgium are spotted in pot holes through out the country so our journey was a bit longer than expected.

Around 4am we decided to Stop at a truck stop and sleep for a few hours before continuing our journey. At one point I had woken up and my leg was a sleep, I couldn't feel it or move it at all. It was completely limp. I opened the door and moved my leg out for a second and then it revived to normal in about a minute or so.

Around 7am we woke up and continued our journey. We had a little nasty suprize when we entered France and were greeted with an €11.50 toll for driving on French roads. Around 11am we were driving into Charles de Gaulle Airport. We parked the car there being that this was the cheapest place we knew of without getting lost in the city. We then got €6.50 / day Zone 1 - 5 passes for Paris and boarded the RER. We eventually arrived at Gard du Nord and walked over to the hostel. We got there, checked in, dropped out bags in the bag room and sat on the terrace for a bit. We chatted with a few Australians, Americans, Germans and Koreans before heading out to see the city.

This was Anja's first time in the city so I took her along the street with the Moulin Rogue, down to a nice park where we sat for about 20 minutes and did some people watching and finally to the Arc du Triump before digging around some shops near by.I always like to check out Fnac and Virgin Mega Store. The places are absolutely huge and seem to have every electronic device that exists. But, being on the most expensive shopping street in Europe we didn't get anything. I eventually walked Anja down to near the Lourve before heading back to the hostel.

We relaxed there and talked with some more people before I arranged my evening. I had some friends in Paris whom were working at the Air Show. Anja wasn't up for too much walking so I setup to meet them near St. Maries Station around 7:30. The RER down there was completely packed and it felt like I was sitting in an oven of human sweat. This weekend was the Music festival as well as the Paris Air Show so the city was packed. Everywhere there was music playing. At the Eifel tower there was a massive concert going on. Thats where my party and I hanged out for a bit before trying to find a pub.

I had suggested that we find one in the neighborhood where I was staying since I knew of a couple there. But when we got to Gard du Nord we accidentally ended up on the wrong side and searching for a pub in Barbes which is a bit of a shady part of town. A few metro stops later we got out at the Moulin Rogue. It look amazing, during the day it"s ugly but at night it looks amazing. Plus there are a lot of large lit up objects on builds around it, most of them are new since I hadn"t seen them the last time I was in Paris 5 weeks ago.

We ended up in an Irish pub near by where a pint of Fosters will cost you €6, which was expensive even by London standards. It wasn"t too long before my party had to catch the last train home and I had to make it back to the hostel before lock out. When I got back to the hostel I cracked open a €2.30 botel of Bavarian and chatted with a load of Germans that were staying at the hostel. They seemed really nice and were willing to speak in English the entire time. If they said something in German, they would translate it to English for me. I wish I could find people like that here.

One made an interesting comment about Germans traveling. The one's under 40 are like any other backpacker, go anywhere to meet everyone. But the one's over 40 seem to only go to places where German is spoken or where there are so many Germans (i.e. Majorca, ect...) that the place could be classified as a Federal State of Germany.

The next morning Anja and I woke up, had breakfast, got ready and headed up to Charles de Gaulle Airport to get our car. We accidentally got off at a station when I saw every other passenger get off at and a message from the driver, which was in French, said something about Charles de Gaulle Airport. I assumed that a change was needed when it wasn't. We ended up waiting about 30 minutes for the next train to the airport.

We eventually got there and tried to get instructions to our friend's hotel from the airport so we could get their bags, they would be driving back with us to Germany. The only instructions I got was via Train when what I needed was instructions for driving. We ended up trying to get there on our own. The hotel name was Formula 1, there are loads of them in France and Belgium and are staff-free for the most part. When we drove up to the hotel there were a load of Africans sitting outside of it looking at me funny. My friend had given me a key code to get it. I used it on the front gate not realizing that it was unlocked. I then went into the hotel and up to their room number. I knocked on the door but there was no answer, I then tried to open that door with the key code but it didn"t work. I went back to the car, text messaged my friends whom were in the city at a museum via their Australian mobile phone # and Anja and I headed on to the Air Show.

The Air Show was completely packed and like every French citizen I just jumped every single queue there was, even the queue to be searched before entering the show. I got yelled at in French once by a cashier but I didn"t let that get in my way. Normally I would never do such a thing but everyone does it in Paris, weather with their car or on foot and I"m tired of having people bud in front of me.

The show was amazing. They showed off so many aircraft, my favorite was the Mirage 2000. It seemed to take off in about 30 Meters and could do twice the speed of sound. That Air Craft moved through the sky like nothing else. I had never seen anything so quick or loud in my life. I was shocked watching it but I couldn"t imagine living in a country that was being invaded with 20 of these things dropping guided bombs every where.

Other than that I was glad to see 2 Concorde's up close and personal. I actually saw one take off from Charles de Gaulle Airport 5 weeks ago before Air France retired their fleet. And the Airbus A380 was interesting. The one girl in the group of people I went drinking with the night before was actually working on the project so it was really interesting to hear what is going on behind the scenes.

One of my friends was an exhibitor at this show. He was warned about giving to many details about his company because there were a lot of spies at the show. Apparently they look normal except that they show great interest in everything and take loads of photos, far more than a normal spectator.

Incase your wondering about the show, it's held every year rotating between Berlin and Paris and it's one of the largest Aerospace and Defense shows in the world with a lot of amazing hardware on display.

Around 2:30 Anja headed back to the car to relax, you could still see all the planes flying from the parting lot so not much was missed. I walked around until 4pm and headed back, while in the parking lot I was a load of sky divers coming down, it was really neat to watch them all. We slept for about 30 minutes and then decided to drive to our friends hotel, for which we now had instructions on how to get too. Unfortunately there was a huge traffic jam in the parking lot. Everyone was trying to bud there car in front of everyone else's and it look 90 minutes to move 350 Meters.

At one point there was a man in front of us with a bunch of kids. They were playing in front of our car and even at one point peeing in front of it. If the car in front of you moved you had to be right on it"s tail otherwise someone would bud in front of you. Suddenly the man in front of us moved his car. The little kids were blocking our way. I had lost it with all the frustrations of this traffic jam so I yelled at the kids in German "SCHNELL!!!" to get them out of our way. You could see them shit themselves as they saw some maniac in a Mercedes with German licenses plates, going insane and about to run them over just to move 2 Meters was yelling at them.

Eventually we got our friends hotel. We waited outside for them for a bit and ended up meeting an Australian girl whom works at VW in Wolfsburg which is the same plant that my company works at. She also knew our friends that we were driving back to Germany with. Small world.

The ride back was pleasant. We ended up filling our car up with Diesel in Belgium which had it for €0.65 / L which is about €0.15 cheaper than in Germany or France. This was a weird gas station though, you had to tell the cashier how much you wanted to buy and pay first. Then if you bought to much you went back and got a refund for the difference.

The rest of the Journey was event-free until we got back to Bremen at 3:45am. We accidentally went down a one way street the wrong way and ended up with the Polizei on our tail. They followed us for about 5 minutes right on our tail down single lane streets as we were trying to find our way through a maze of one way streets to our friend's home. Eventually another cop car followed and they pulled us over. 4 Police officers surrounded our vehicle, they took our paperwork and opened up one of our car doors to look inside. They checked to make sure that Anja wasn't smuggling people into the country being that there were 3 foreigners in the car. They just did a quick check and sent us on our way without any hassle.

I was pretty sure they were going to slap a fine on Anja for going down the one way the wrong way. About 1 minute later they pulled us over again and re-clarified all of our details. I guess they didn't have anything else to do that night. German police are helpful and usually don't have big superiority complex's but I have seen some TV shows that depict corrupt police. I'm glad to see that those shows are baseless.

We eventually got to our friend's place and crashed for the night. This morning we said our thank you's and Anja and I headed back to Hannover. Over all it was a really nice weekend. I glad I live somewhere that things like this are possible on the small budgets that I have.