I would be the first to admit that I was nervous about experiencing the culture in Paris, especially after everything I've heard about the "rude" French. I thought that as soon as we arrived in Paris, people would spot us out in the crowd as typical Americans and give us a hard time if we tried to ask for help. However, I was completely taken aback when I had the extreme opposite experience! I'll elaborate more on this throughout this post...

Gare "Gah!" de Bordeaux St. Jean

We left Gare (train station) de Bordeaux St. Jean on an early morning train that left at 7:55 am. I didn't notice this when we got the tickets, but we didn't get assigned seats, which wasn't too bad. Our tickets said "01 Place Selon Disponibilite." At first, I panicked that we actually didn't get a reservation and were gipped by the train officer. However, Abhinav spoke with a very nice French lady (indication number one that all French are not rude and snooty), who explained the best that she could in broken English that the phrase meant that we could sit in any available seat as people got on and off the train from Bordeaux to Paris. 

We settled in with our bags in two seats and fell asleep for about 2 hours, before the train started filling up. After moving twice because we were sitting in seats that people had reserved, we decided to retreat to the cafeteria cart on the train to have a nice breakfast. Muffins, apple sauce, and orange juice gave us the "Itis," so we went back to car 15 to find 2 empty seats. We moved around a number of times until the train was completely packed. Fortunately, we wound up in Paris without getting kicked out of our seats!

Because of our extensive planning, we found it relatively easy to find a branch of FNAC near Gare Paris-Montparnassee that would give us the tickets we bought in advance online for "How to Become Parisian in One Hour," rated #3 on the list of "Things to Do in Paris" on Tripadvisor in April 2011. It's supposed to be a 1-hour comedy that eases the transition of a tourist into the culture of Paris. Even with our backpacks and all of our gear, it was easy to get the tickets and navigate the metro, when you studied the map in advance. We bought a bundle of 10 metro tickets each for 12€ using an automated machine.

Finding our hostel was a little troublesome since we took down the wrong directions, but we found our way after a good up-hill workout with all of our gear. Once again, we found the right street because a nice French lady offered her help when she noticed our confused faces. (Second indication that all French people are NOT rude.)

We settled into our hostel, Le Montclaire, which I would personally recommend to anyone with my experience so far. We are in a 6-bed dorm with an ensuite bathroom for tonight. They provide free sheets to each person when you check in and you set them up yourself on your bed. The bathroom in our room was clean and well kept as well. We'll see how it holds up when we switch to a shared-bathroom 6-bed dorm tomorrow night for the rest of our stay...

After dumping our stuff at the hostel, we started worrying about our next train reservation, which is necessary since European trains are often too full to hop on when you try to reserve them the day of. Extensive research (using the amazing FREE Wi-fi at Le Montclaire) showed us that there was a 0.1% chance that we would get the Zurich to Milan train on April 28th if we decided to travel to Milan from Brussels using the Brussels-Zurich-Milan route. If the worst should happen, and we could not get seats on the train from Zurich to Milan, we would be stuck in Zurich for a few days, costing us accommodation costs that would exceed $50/night/person and loss of reservations that we made ahead of time in Milan (aka Last Supper and hostels).

Thomas Cook's European Rail Timetable guide was a blessing because we happened to find an alternative route that we could possibly reserve ahead of time in France. We still weren't sure whether it could be done, but we decided to give it a try anyways. We headed to Gare du Nord (another one of the many train stations in Paris) to purchase the Paris Museum 2-day pass and try to reserve our ticket from Brussels to Milan on April 28th. We didn't think it was going to be possible to reserve the train tickets since traveling outside of France most likely meant that French train stations would not be able to reserve them. However, we got lucky once again! While we didn't get our first choice of reservation, we were able to find a (slightly more expensive, but still very reasonable) route that would provide us some beautiful scenery in Germany and Switzerland during the day, and get us to Milan in time to make our hostel reservation!

Center seats at the show!

After getting our train tickets and breathing a sigh of relief we headed to Theatre De La Main D'or, the location of "How to Become Parisian in One Hour." It was a good thing that we got there by 6:35-ish, because it was packed! We got very good seats, far away from the front row, where Olivier Giraud (the comedian) picked on people from the audience. It was humorous, but did not really live up to the hype, unfortunately. Overall, it was something nice and relaxing to do before we really start seeing the major tourist attractions in Paris.

Afterwards, we took the metro back to the hostel. On our way back, we stopped at a small French restaurant, Café de la Place, which was NOTHING like Bordeaux's. We had a delicious nutella crêpe and a glass of coke on our table in under five minutes. We were out the door in 20 minutes! The waitress was awesome and very friendly, as well as the restaurant manager.

So, that concludes the awesome day that we spent in Paris. We mainly limited ourselves to the artistic Montmartre district and got a taste of the quieter side of Paris as a result, which I think I'll really like :) Tomorrow, we're planning an excursion to Versaille and heading to the Arc de Triomphe. Details on those will be up tomorrow!