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Published: November 2nd 2010
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Kat took us to the train station where a big bad surprise awaited us!!!!Our train tickets to Paris had gone up from R300 each to R900 each as we had not purchased our tickets earlier. This was depressing and I felt like kicking myself because our host in Paris had repeatedly told me to book the tickets early as this exact thing would happen!!! Now it was too late!! OK what's done is done it's a learning curve - a damn expensive one at that but we were on our way to Paris and we were excited!! And besides Kee's ticket was vaild for a whole year so she could travel for free for the entire year!!! Mmmm...I think we gonna have to leave her here in Europe!!!
Out of the train station, into the streets of Paris, the first thing we saw was the dirt. The streets of Paris were filthy, just outside the train station there seemed to have been a fresh produce market that was open a few days before and all the left over rubbish was just strewn all over the place. AWFUL!!! but that was not all - as we trolleyed our bags further down
Streets of Paris
were so dirty - we were all so surprised the streets to our host's apartment there was dog poop all over - it was just gross!!! We were really shocked - Paris was supposed to be the most beautiful city in the world!!!
We easily found our host's apartment but I lost the combination password to open the main door and they lived five flights up, so now the frantic search in all our pockets for the little slip of paper with the combination numbers!!! OK. got it. Then it's the climb up five flights of stairs to the apartment. Maria opens the door, we enter and another shock awaits us. The apartment is dirty, clothes and toys lying everywhere and the smell!!! Gosh I can't even mention it...unbearable!!
The girls looked at me, big eyes opened in horror. Then Keeran whispers to me, 'Mom, we can't stay here, we have to find somewhere else" shhh we'll talk about it later!! Let's just get outta here for now!! so we asked Maria where we could leave our bags as we wanted to go out into the city for a while and we were shown this absolutely spic and span bedroom with a triple bunk bed, fresh clean sheets
and a heater.
Maria was really nice, she gave us some maps and wrote down the metro directions so we would not get lost and off we went into the timeless city Paris.
What can I say...we immediately fell in love with Paris, but first we needed to discuss our accomodation arrangements. As I had not budgeted for accomodation, this was going to be a tricky one( price of accomodation in Paris was ridiculous and our host Maria was so nice, that it would just kill me to tell her we were leaving, so I told the girls we would just stay one night and see how it goes and if we were not happy, we'll look for a place tomorrow. Agreed...we went back to the apartment and what awaited us was beyond words...Maria had prepared a fabulous dinner, complete with wine and a huge box of Lindt chocolates. Now how could we be rude and say we were leaving with hospitality like this.
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