I know this is supposed to be Part 2 of the 11/15 journal, but I didn't get to finish writing it yesterday, so here it is on 11/16. Let's not get hung up on the minor details.
You can't live in France for seven months without going to Paris at least once; it's just a rite of passage. And no, the airport doesn't count. So, I made sure to check this off my list right off the bat with the first vacances, and Paris was my third destination after Barcelona and Marseille.
Paris itself wasn't necessarily bad—it was certainly better than New York City—so I wouldn't say I regret going in the first place, but dear god, I wish it had gone so, SO much differently.
Trouble started as soon as I emerged from the train station. I FaceTimed my mom while I waited outside for EG, and during this phone call my mom reluctantly shared some devastating news: my great-grandmother was going on hospice. I cried after I hung up, pulled myself together when EG arrived, then started crying again in the Uber on the way to the hotel.
Check-in time was at 11:00 PM, but we didn't get to the hotel until about 11:10, so we were scared they would turn us away, but I called the front desk and they said not to worry, someone is there all night and could check us in a little late. Now, the thing with this hotel.... I'm the one who picked it out, and to be honest, I have NO idea how the heck I decided on it. I remember looking for something that was equidistant from the Eiffel Tower and the Catacombs, because those were our two major destinations, and I guess I picked this hotel because it fulfilled that requirement, but it wasn't even IN Paris: it was in Fresnes, which is a 30 minute drive outside of the city. I ended up spending almost my entire travel budget JUST on Ubers to and from the hotel. I don't know what I was thinking, but choosing the Ibis Budget Hotel Fresnes was definitely a major mistake and I regret it a lot.
Afterwards, we reunited with EG and went to the Eiffel Tower, because you can't say you've been to Paris if you haven't seen the Eiffel Tower. A few other assistants happened to be in the area, too, so we met up with them as well and took our fill of touristy photos. Maybe this is just because, as I stated in my previous entry, I'm not big on architecture, but to be honest, I wasn't super impressed by the Eiffel Tower. It was just, I don't know... A tower. But again, seeing it at least once is a necessity, so I'm glad I was able to check it off my list. I enjoyed it much more at nighttime, since it was lit up and sparkled every hour. Everything looks prettier when it's sparkling. I told myself I wouldn't buy any of the cheesy souvenirs all the shady vendors had laid out on blankets every five feet around the Eiffel Tower, but I ended up buying a little Eiffel Tower that lights up rainbow colors, because it was only 5 euros and the guy threw in a free rose gold Eiffel Tower keychain. CL also got a light-up Eiffel Tower, but instead of rainbow lights, hers sparkles like the tower actually does, which is more accurate than the rainbow lights; but hey, rainbows!
So, that was a good day. The next day, October 30th, was when things started to suck again.
About two weeks earlier, EG and I had both purchased tickets for Parc Astérix, dated for October 30th, so we could enjoy their Peur sur le Parc Halloween event the day before the big holiday. Tickets were 46 euros and non-refundable. CL and another assistant, AR, wanted to join us, but tickets were sold out for the day. Somehow, though, CL's dad was able to find them two tickets through a third party website. A little suspicious, but yay! So, the four of us order an Uber and head off to the park. Apparently it was an hour away from our hotel, which is WAY farther than I'd thought; I remembered keeping the distance to Parc Astérix in mind when I chose the hotel, and Google Maps said it was only about 30 minutes. Apparently I was somehow just totally wrong about how far every single destination was from our hotel when I booked it. I really do not understand how I messed up so badly, but at least there were four of us to split the cost of the Uber.
About an hour later, we arrived in Plailly... and the exit that led to Parc Astérix was closed. Okay, so we'd have to take a detour; whatever, not a huge deal. Except then a police officer approached the window and told the driver that it's not just the exit that's closed: it's the park. The park was too full and so they stopped admitting people for the rest of the day. Keep in mind this was around 1:00 PM, and the park was open until 6:00 PM. We tried explaining that we already bought tickets, but they didn't care: they said we could use those tickets for a different day, except I had a dated ticket that explicitly says it CANNOT be used on a different day. There was no mention of a refund.
To say I was devastated is an understatement. Words can't express how much I love Halloween: it's my favorite holiday by far, and I always celebrate it in the biggest way possible. It's not very widely celebrated here in France, so the only options for a "big" Halloween were basically Disneyland or Parc Astérix. I had originally planned on going to Disneyland, but ultimately decided tickets were too expensive and chose Parc Astérix instead. I should have just gone with Disney in the first place! It would have been better to spent 100 euros and actually get to go to the park than to straight up waste 46 euros. I genuinely do not understand how they could just turn away people that already had tickets! And what's the point of selling tickets in advance if that doesn't guarantee you entry to the park?? I was pissed, disgusted, and heartbroken all at once. I literally couldn't speak for at least half an hour.
EG told the driver to take us to Chantilly, because we were fairly close to there and that's where she lives. I had wanted to visit her there eventually, because it seems like a lovely little town and they have horses, but I was too depressed to enjoy the unexpected side trip. The worst part was that I was wearing my special Halloween outfit (left) that I'd purchased from Spirit Halloween specifically for this occasion. Now, in the US, I would happily wear this outfit anywhere on any day in October; but in France, where Halloween is just a fad that never really caught on to begin with and is continuing to lose popularity, I looked like an absolute clown. The outfit would have been fun and festive in a cartoon-themed amusement park, but in public, on the streets of a small town? I was mortified, and didn't want anyone to look at me.
My hopes were lifted for a brief moment when I saw that the Chantilly Château was having a Halloween event... except it was sold out. So, we explored the castle, but with nothing Halloween-y about it. It was a really nice castle, but I was pretty miserable the whole time. Although, I did at least appreciate that the owner of the castle REALLY loved dogs: there were dog statues and paintings EVERYWHERE. Here's just one example out of many:
We ate dinner at a burger place (aptly named Burgers & Fries), then headed back to the hotel, where CL and AR had also booked a room. I'm glad we were all in the same place, but I feel really bad that they joined us somewhere that was so out of the way. I know I've already said this, but I have no idea how I picked such a bad location after doing such intensive research.
I originally wanted to go to the Catacombs on Halloween, but as I mentioned before, they were sold out, so instead we went to the zoo, which was having a Halloween event of their own. Tickets were discounted if you wore a costume, but I found out that the discount I get with my pass d'éducation was actually better; it was still fun to wear the costume there, though, especially since I was able to pose with other birds and get pictures like the one here on the left. CL and I got separated from EG and AR almost immediately, so we spent pretty much the whole day together. There were little events scheduled throughout the day, and we made sure to stop by all of them, but they were definitely tailored just for children, so although CL and I are youthful enough to love a carousel ride, we knew that these little skits were not intended for us. Still, the whole park was decorated for Halloween, which was really cool to see, especially knowing how unpopular Halloween is in France.
The zoo closed at 5:00 PM, and we stayed all the way until then. Afterwards, we looked for any restaurants with Halloween decorations for dinner, and ended up at a place called Bistro du Commerce. CL and I both ordered beef bourguignon because it was perfect weather for stew, but we should have ordered what AR got: truffle raviolis. She let us try a bite, and it was HEAVENLY. The waiter was really friendly and accommodating, too, so when I come back to Paris for Player One I'll have to stop here again, too, and get those raviolis. I hope they don't change their menu before then. Also, instead of going house-to-house, the handful of kids that actually go trick-or-treating in France stop at participating stores and restaurants for their candy, and this bistro was one such participant. I asked if I was allowed to trick or treat since I had a costume on, and they actually let me! I only took a single piece of candy, but that's more trick-or-treating than I expected to do, so I was stoked.
At 9:00 PM, the four of us had tickets for a walking tour similar to the one CL and I did in Barcelona. We covered a lot of ground and learned a lot of history, but unfortunately our guide was really hard to understand, and the tour was super disorganized in the beginning so it got a late start. My favorite part was, believe it or not, probably when we stopped in front of the rat poison store that was in Ratatouille. I actually don't remember that scene, but the tour guide pulled it up on her phone to compare, and yup, that store sure was in the movie. I had CL take pictures of me flipping off the dead rats in my plague mask, because, you know, rats carried the plague; I need her to send them to me, though.
Happily, and maybe even miraculously, my Halloween in Paris was a blast. I had no idea that in less than 24 hours, everything would go to hell.
Even though I couldn't make it to the Catacombs on Halloween as planned, I was able to snatch a spot at 1:15 PM on November 1st. My train to London wasn't until 4:15 PM, and the Catacombs would only take about an hour to walk through, so I figured that was plenty of time. I checked out of the hotel, said goodbye to EG and CL (AR had left early in the morning so we said our goodbyes the night before), and headed into the Catacombs alone. It was a surreal experience. There are so. many. bones. Like, I know in my head that there are hundreds of years' worth of bones stacked in there, but to actually see them was mind-boggling. Every time I turned a corner, I thought, "This has to be the last of them," but they NEVER. STOPPED. And several passages were blocked off from the public, which means there were even MORE bones than what I saw. My brain could not process that these were real bones from real corpses of real people that had lived as long ago as medieval times. The way that they were organized in the same tidy pattern over and over and over felt disturbingly unnatural. I took pictures of every single wall of bones I saw, all of those pictures probably look almost identical.
Unfortunately, I'll never know for sure, because I no longer have any of those pictures. Why? Well, because about an hour after I emerged from the Catacombs, someone stole my cell phone.
Here's what happened. After the Catacombs, I retrieved my suitcase and laptop case from the luggage storage where I'd left them, then walked to the nearest metro station, from which I would take a metro to Gare du Nord, where I would catch my train to London. I bought my metro ticket and followed the signs for the line that Google Maps said would take me to Gare du Nord. I believe it was line 4. I waited under a sign that said 4 (or whatever number it was) with an arrow pointing down, assuming that this arrow meant that train would arrive there at that platform. At exactly 3:05 PM, I sent my mom a text to let her know I was getting on the train soon, and when the train pulled up, I put my phone in my coat pocket and got on the train. Just to make sure I was in the right place, I looked at the map inside the train itself, and realized right away that Gare du Nord was not one of the stops, so I hurried off the train before the doors closed. And in the two seconds I took my hand out of my pocket to adjust my suitcase, someone stole my phone.
I didn't realize it was gone right away. I figured out that the downwards arrow meant that my desired train was downstairs, so I went down the stairs (fortunately there weren't many, because my suitcase was huge and heavy), and I found the correct platform right away. I stuck my hand in my coat pocket, and didn't feel my phone. No worries: I also had an umbrella and a beanie stuffed in that pocket, so it was probably just under or between them. I took out the umbrella; still no phone. Weird. I took out the beanie, and it wasn't in or under that, either. Okay... Maybe I'd actually put it in my other pocket. Nope, that was empty. Jeans pockets? No way, I knew better than to EVER put anything in my pants pockets in Paris, because I know how prolific pickpocketing is. (Ironic, right?) I knew I hadn't put it in my shoulder bag, but I unzipped both pockets and checked there just in case. Nope. Not in my laptop case or suitcase either, which I knew, but I was getting desperate. At this point, my brain still wasn't thinking "stolen"; I just thought I must have dropped it. So I retraced my steps and scoured the ground. Nothing. That's when the panic started to sink in. I double and triple checked every single pocket on my body, and then I ran back up to the main entrance to look for a security guard or someone to help me. I didn't see anyone, so I went to the ticket booth and told the person there that I lost my phone somewhere in the station. Instead of sending someone to help me look, they just looked annoyed and told me there was a police station nearby, and basically shooed me away. I retraced my steps again, dragging my suitcase up and down all those stairs, to no avail.
Eventually, I ended up back at the main entrance. By that point, I was fully having a panic attack: my first one since arriving in France. Lost and hyperventilating, I stumbled outside, and then I broke down sobbing. A young woman in a young vest that said "Amnesty International" approached me and asked what happened. There was an Amnesty International club back at my college, and that branch was mostly concerned with stopping gun violence, but that was all I knew about the organization. Still, the woman seemed trustworthy, and I was horrified and confused and alone, and I told her that I lost my phone in the station. I told her that my mom might be able to track it from her phone using Find My Device or Life360, and that I could call my mom on FaceTime. The woman didn't have a Facebook account, so she asked one of her colleagues if he had one, but I told her that I had my laptop so if the train station had WiFi, I could call my mom from there. It did in fact have WiFi, so I went back inside, sat on the floor, booted up my laptop, sent my mom a frantic Facebook message, and then FaceTimed her. She was at work, but thankfully she saw my message and was able to step out and answer my call right away. I told her what happened, she told me to stay calm, and then minimized the call so she could pull up Life360 and Find My Device. She sent me the GPS coordinates, which said my phone was still within the train station.
To be honest, I have no memory of exactly what happened next. I would think that I would have asked the Amnesty International woman and her colleagues to help me look for my phone, but I'm pretty sure that's not what happened. I don't remember why. At some point, the woman handed me off to one of her colleagues that was fluent in English (I guess my French was getting worse the more I panicked), and he told me that pickpocketing is really bad at this station in particular, and unfortunately my phone was probably stolen, not lost. He offered to walk me to the police station, so we did that. There was a lady cop in uniform outside the station, and she said that if I had the IMEI number, they could track it. Thankfully, I had needed to send that number to my mom at some point, so I had it in my Facebook messages. But when they let me in the station and I gave them that number, they wouldn't do anything with it. I showed them the GPS coordinates my mom sent, and asked if someone could go there and look for it; they just ignored me. I sat there for an hour while a man at a desk filled out paperwork and insulted me for not speaking better French. He had absolutely no interest in helping me: since pickpocketing is so common there, as soon as he heard "stolen phone," he wrote me off as another hapless tourist that was a victim of a minor crime that would be put on file but never pursued or solved. It was agonizingly frustrating. It was when I was signing the stupid paperwork that I realized it wasn't just my phone that was gone: I had one of those sticky card wallets on the back of my phone, and in it were both my American debit card and French debit card. Fortunately, I'd never gotten around to activating my French debit card, so that was unusable to begin with, but my American card... That was a problem. I asked the officer (or whatever his job title was; he wasn't in a uniform) if I could use the internet to deactivate my card, and he looked at me like I was an idiot and said "You don't need to do that right away." So basically, he insisted that someone had stolen my phone and cards, but didn't seem to have any reason to believe that the thief would try to use my phone and cards. It didn't make any sense to me.
After that absolute waste of time, I wandered dejectedly back to the train station. I sat back on the ground and took my laptop back out, then messaged CL on Facebook, since I knew she was staying in Paris for one more day. Bless her heart, she met me at the station right away. My mom said my phone hadn't moved on either Find My Device or Life360, so, clinging to the hope that maybe I had just dropped it in the station and it was still there, CL and I returned to the platform where I'd last used my phone and searched again. We even enlisted the help of four police officers who were actually helpful. I told them I thought I dropped my phone when I got off the train, so they searched along the tracks, but they didn't find anything. They asked if I was 100% positive that I dropped it and it wasn't stolen, and as soon as I admitted that it is possible that it was stolen, they lost all interest. Apparently pickpocketing of phones is SO common at this station, and in Paris in general, that the police don't even bother trying to find the stolen items because there's just so many of them. Feeling utterly defeated, I followed CL back to the hotel (good old Ibis Budget in Fresnes again; since AR had checked out earlier than her, she had room for one more person in her room). I don't know what time it was by then, but my train to London had definitely already left. That trip was clearly not going to happen.
CL ordered UberEats for us, and I inventoried just exactly how much I had lost as a result of this incident, because writing lists always makes me feel better and more put-together. Thankfully, it could have been worse: I still had my laptop, my US drivers license, my pass d'éducation, 30 euros in cash, and, most importantly by far, my passport. I also still had all my luggage. But the amount of non-tangible things I had lost is nauseating. Looking at the full list upsets me so much that it actually causes a physical pain in my chest, but, to name just a few things that are now gone forever:
1. My brand-new Samsung Galaxy S22, which I had purchased in August and paid off completely for $800 in early October (you can read my post about that ordeal here).
2. The ace flag phone case I'd bought off of Redbubble.
3. My Bank of America debit card, which could easily be deactivated and replaced for free; however, they can only send the replacement to my US address, so I have to wait for my mom to ship it to me, which could take weeks.
4. My Caisse d'Epargne debit card, which can also be replaced for free, but is also a sloooow process. At the time of writing this journal, over two weeks have passed and I STILL can't access the money in my French bank account.
5. About 30-40 pictures from the zoo on Halloween. I had started to upload them to Facebook when I got back to the hotel on Halloween night, but I was too tired to post the last batch and was planning on posting them either while on the train to London or once I got to the hostel in London.
6. Every single picture I took during the walking tour.
7. Every single picture I took in the Catacombs.
8. The pictures from Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona. I actually didn't realize that those were missing until yesterday, when I was working on Part 1 of this journal. I thought I had uploaded them to Facebook, but either I missed them or the upload failed, because they're not there. That especially hurts because that was my favorite part of the entire Barcelona trip.
9. My American phone number, which I've had for about 10 years and is connected to all of my email addresses and various social media accounts, including WhatsApp, TikTok, Snapchat, and GroupMe. I was able to get AT&T to make me a new SIM card with that same number, thank god, but again, now I have to wait for my mom to mail it to me.
10. My French SIM card. I have since been able to get that replaced, but it took several days and cost me 10 euros.
11. Any pictures I took, downloaded, or screenshotted after September 9th. My OneDrive had run out of storage on that date, and my Google Photos haven't updated since January. There's a chance that I may have had photo syncing turned on with my Samsung account, but I need my US phone number to access that account. I feel like I had all photo syncing turned off, though, so I'm not getting my hopes up. At least I have all my pre-September 9th pictures on OneDrive, but they're all in one big folder instead of the many folders I'd had them neatly organized in on my phone.
Since returning to Saint-Quentin on November 2nd, things have been really rough. I was able to purchase a crummy little 60 euro phone (thanks to a loan from assistant EC), but I wasn't able to put a SIM card in it until recently, because the first replacement I ordered was too small so I had to wait for a second one to come in. The WiFi in my apartment no longer works, but the very kind man that works at the school's front gate and lives on the floor below me gave me the password to his WiFi. The signal is very strong in the kitchen but weak and spotty in my room, but it was WAY better than nothing while waiting for my SIM card to come in so I can have a hotspot, so I am extremely grateful to him. I intend to send him a Christmas card from the US.
My fellow Saint-Quentin assistants have been a huge help and support as well, especially financially. My 30 euros burned up really fast, so I've been surviving on loans for the past two weeks. Just from those 24 hours alone with CL in Paris, I ended up owing her about $127, which I sent her on PayPal (because fortunately I was still able to get into that account). I know it can't be helped, and I'm definitely going to pay them back, but I seriously hate asking people for money. EC convinced me to go with her and another assistant (L, I think I called him before) to Pierrefonds on November 6th, which was absolutely lovely and I might make a separate post about the trip. Yesterday, I was finally able to withdraw some cash from my French bank account, so that was a huge weight off my shoulder. My mom also shipped my package with my American SIM card, debit card, a phone that's the same model as the one that was stolen (she had upgraded her phone at the same time I did, but never got around to setting up her new phone, so it's just been sitting in a box), and some other goodies, so now I just have to wait for that to get here.
I have my good days and my bad days, and it seems like things will start to get better and then abruptly get worse, but, I'm getting through it. I'm extremely thankful for my amazing support system, both here in France and back home in the US. I'm hoping that by this time next month, everything will finally be sorted out.
Oh, and one silver lining amongst all of this: my great-grandma isn't on hospice anymore! It feels like the universe said, "You can keep your great-grandma, but I'm taking your phone." I guess that's fair.
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