Sacre Bleu! The Tour - A Hotel Rendezvous

There I was, armed with a phrase book in one hand and an ignorance of foreign cultures in the other, about to engage in my first proper exchage with a French person. My intentions of looking through the phrase book in advance to learn some useful sentences had rapidly fallen by the wayside, so instead I was going with Plan B.

'Parlez-vous anglais?'
'No.'

Well, shit. Already this wasn't going to plan. She was supposed to speak English, we'd have a chat and a laugh, she'd be so impressed by my wit, charm and good looks that she'd discount the price of the room and introduce me to her beautiful daughter. She had yet to scream at or slap me yet though, so it wasn't all bad.

Negotiating the rest of the conversation in a way that mostly involved me pointing at a name on a piece of paper and saying 'Reservation.' I managed to get checked in, paying in cash because using a credit card seemed like it could involve more talking, which I'd already proved to not be a strong suit. I was elated enough that our booking was there at all, so remaining in the playground of low expectations seemed the comfortable choice for me.

Earlier I had received a message from Brendan requesting that, when I arrived at the hotel, I ask at the counter for directions from the train station he and Rob were arriving at. Judging by how the previous communication endeavour had just went, I figured this kind of question would end up going around in a circle that involved me mumbling something in badly pronounced, broken French, and her staring at me like an idiot. Personally I thought that could wait until my second day in the country.

Instead, in an act that most wise men, and a good number of morons, would have warned against, I decided to provide him with directions myself. These directions consisted of, 'Get Metro line 2 and get off at Juares,' which were the exact same directions I was working off of, only, in addition, theirs included my hopes that Metro 2 was easier to find from their arrival station than it was mine. After all, they owed me money for the room.

While waiting for their arrival, aware that, due to their reliance on my directions, this could be a wait that extended long into the evening, I decided to go for a brief sojourn outside, despite the protests of most of my functioning body parts. After convincing them that I had no intention of bringing the pack with me this time, we uniformly set off to see what delights Paris had in store.

Which, as it turns out, was a man cooking corn over a barrel of fire housed in a shopping trolley. For a city that tends to pride itself on its culinary offerings, it was something of a surprise for this to be the first possible food option that I should stumble across. And as tempting as it was, I figured it would be foolish of me to put the first thing I see into my mouth. That mindset could be saved for a future career as a Parisian gigolo.

Moments later, as my mouth and most of the front of my shirt dined on some kind of delicious chocolate-filled pastry, I wandered the streets and strolled alongside the canal near the hotel, managing to narrowly avoid being run over by the cyclists that almost outnumber the cars and marvelling at the fact that no one seemed to tell a large portion of the city's population that the roller blading craze died out in the '90s. The outdoor chairs and tables of the cafes spent their time making the aquaintence with the backsides of any number of people, who smoked away and drank afternoon beers out of glasses far fancier than anything beer rightly deserves. It would seem they all felt that I needed a reminder that, even at their most casual, they were far classier than I would ever manage to be.

Just as I was starting to realise that I may have underestimated exactly how cool it would be outside, lured into the false promise of warmth by the late afternoon sun, the Oompa Loompas in my pocket brought word that Brendan and Rob were almost there. It was time to return to the hotel room to set up an appropriate welcoming party. Nothing offers the promise of an enjoyable trip ahead quite like me sprawled seductively across a bed, reading the Paris section of my Lonely Planet guide that I'd sworn I would have already studied thoughroly by this point.

As I heard them in the hall, I briefly wondered what people's thoughts would be if I described my current position of 'Waiting for two guys to meet me in a cheap hotel room'. The thought quickly made way for the realisation that it sounded like the hallway had become something of a navigation quandry for them, and it was best for me to yell at them down the hall to save us from certain disaster.

With that crisis averted and manly greetings exchanged, I introduced them to our accomodation for the next two nights. The fact that it had beds and wasn't a hostel seemed to impress them enough, so I suppose I just came as a fortunate bonus. I worried a little that their minds may have been blown when they discovered that we had a balcony. It may have only been as wide as my foot and looked out to a breathtaking view of the train station across the road, but still, in the most fundamental architectural sense, it was a balcony.

But all was not rainbows and sunshine in Room 31 at Hotel la Comete though. You see, we found ourselves with two slight issues in the room.

Firstly, we had a shower that consisted of a handheld showerhead that came with the misguided selling point of no place on the wall to actually attach it to. Nor was there any kind of shower curtain or door. This meant that if we wanted to shower without covering the bathroom with enough water to have Noah seriously considering another ark, we were forced to sit on the floor of the bathtub, feeling like an invalid as we bathed. If there was some sort of attractive French nurse inlcluded with the room to assist with this process, all would be forgiven, but no health care professional of any nationality was to be found over the next two nights.

Secondly, we had the beds. Three people to a room, divided up between a double and a rather large single bed. The maths was simple – two of us would be getting rather cosy on the double. Through a decision-making process that somehow occurred without me being aware of it, me and Rob were nominated as the lucky newlyweds. Would love blossom, or would one of us just be deflowered? Only time would tell, even if none of us ever would.

Ah, Paris, the city of romance, the city of lights, the city of possible accidental spooning in the middle of the night. We had arrived.