Our first night in Paris was not enjoyable. First, we missed our flight from London and then we had the most unpleasant experience on the Metro . All we were trying to do was grab dinner. The person at the hotel recommended we take the Metro three stops because there are restaurants open later there.
We go to the Metro station and try to buy tickets, but the machine only takes exact change or a credit card. We didn’t have exact change and the credit card wasn’t working. Henry went to the teller and told her where we were trying to go, Montparnasse - Bienvenüe, and tried to buy tickets from her, but there was a language barrier, and she finally swiped us in for free, and then spouted some French at us, but Henry didn’t understand any of it. The train comes and we wait for the doors to open, but it doesn’t open. Apparently on some of the older lines, the doors are not automatic, there is a lever on the door that you have to pull to open it. A guy on the train saw us just standing there, so he opened the door for us from the inside.
We get to our stop and as we are getting close to the exit, there is a security checkpoint, checking tickets. Except we don’t have tickets since the women swiped us in. We tried explaining that to the officers, but they insisted that we committed an illegal activity and assume we are lying and that we jumped the turnstile. There was also talk about calling the police and the embassy. Look at me, do I look like I jump turnstiles? Am I even tall enough to?
Henry argued with them for over half an hour, trying to explain how one of their co-workers let us through and that we did not purposely commit an illegal act. At one point one of the officers says, “This is not USA, this is France.” At that moment, I knew we would never win, they hated us Americans and were going to make us pay. So we were fined €35 a piece and in Paris, you have to pay upfront. If you don’t have cash, they are equipped to take credit cards.
I’m still wondering if we got scammed. The woman at our stop knew where we were going because Henry had told her the stop were trying to go to and swiped us through. After our debacle with the four officers that fined us, we saw them all outside the train station, not working anymore. They all stopped working after our incident. And the rest of our trip in Paris, we never saw another security checkpoint. It just all seemed very suspicious and too coincidental.
So the morale of this story, pay your own way for everything, there are no such things as favors or free rides!
Side note: One of the nights while we were walking to dinner we heard an American girl walking by saying, “She invited me and then I got fined.” We’re not sure what exactly she was talking about, but again, it seems like another French person duped an American person and she got fined.