The Night at the Airport

---

After arriving in Paris from Amsterdam on the night train I took by myself. O have no fear it was not an overnight train, but it was kind of strange traveling alone. Michelle was supposed to go with me, but when I reserved my ticket it cost me 70-something franc for some reason I cannot remember. O wait! It was because all of the seats reserved for eurail were booked so I had to purchase an actual ticket which was a huge bummer. O well. Anyway that is not the point of this tale. Please allow me to continue. When I arrived in Paris Nord (Paris North) I ran into some trouble. I needed to get a ticket on the RER 43 to Charles de Gaulle Airport before the last one left. Well I had very little coin money and the ticket machine only accepted coins or credit card. The tickets cost 8 euro. HA! Round trip was 16! Since my funds were insufficient I tried to use my card. Needless to say it would accept either my credit or debit card. I started to become frantic a little because I was running out of time, knew no French, and had no idea what to do to fix my present situation. Just then a black rail man who didn't speak any English came up and tried to assist me. I made a valiant attempt to communicate with him in French but it was all to no avail. Then another station guard who also didn't speak English tried to help as well. This guy actually was successful and to him I am thankful. First he tried to help me with my card and when that didn't work he led me upstairs to a "person" ticket booth but it was closed so walked me outside the train station to an ATM where he started talking about change so I pulled out a 50 euro bill and he goes NO! He then motioned for me to put the money away and I realized he wanted me to take money out of the ATM. It was a lovely little game of charades. Anyway, I took out 20 euro from the machine and it gave me two 10 euro bills. I gave him one of 10s hoping he'd come back with it which he did. He went into a cafe next door and got change for me in coins. We returned to the train station and went to the ticket machines. The first one did not work at all, the second only accepted cards and the third one was a charm. I got my ticket and the guard walked with me and showed me how the ticket thing worked so I could get to the rails and walked me in the direction of my RER and saw me off. He was a very nice man and was a huge help to me. Definitely made my life easier and I am very thankful that such people still exist in this world. He proved to me one thing, French people don't hate Americans. They just hate how ethnocentric most of us are. It proves that attempting to speak another country's language even a little bit goes a long way. They are definitely more willing to help you when you do than when you don't. END.

---