July 11th – After a 7-ish hour flight, we made it to the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Neither Adam nor I can sleep on planes, so after getting only 3 hours of sleep the previous night, and close to no sleep on our overnight plane ride, we were both exhausted.  We were hoping that since our plane was grounded in NY for 1.5 hours, that our bags made it on…wishful thinking.

Waiting at the baggage carousel proved us wrong.  Our bags were stuck in NY.  We were in Paris. Neither of us can say more than “bonjour”, “merci”, “croissant”, and “chocolat” in French.  Thank goodness for English speaking American Airlines reps!!  The nice lady at the counter spoke English very well, and after finding out we were from Herndon, VA, she mentioned that she was previously an au pair in Reston!! score!! We found a connection with the baggage lady!

She was nice enough to call someone or another to confirm that our bags never left NY, and said they would be on the next flight to Paris and that someone would deliver our bags to us immediately after they arrived.  We also got some helpful tips on taking the metro instead of taxi to our hotel (or studio in our case since we are using airbnb.com for the majority of our stay in Europe) because it would be lot cheaper, but since both of us were exhausted, we  (or at least I was) 1) were looking for the quickest way to our room, and 2) couldn’t really understand all her directions due to her French accent and so didn’t remember most of what she said.

We decided to take a taxi anyway to get from point A to B asap.

Walking out of the terminal, some guy approached us and asked us if we needed a taxi, and informed us that the line for taxis had a 1+ hour wait and that his company could get us in a car immediately….for a price of 85 euros.  He seemed to give somewhat of a sales pitch, and we were at first thinking that was way too much, but then considering that we were about 40ish minutes outside of Paris (we stayed near the Eiffel Tower), a cab ride may cost around 40+ euros, plus we’d have to wait in line for a long time.

Eventually we caved, and decided to suck it up and pay the 85 euros to get us to our room.  The guy then walked over to another 2 guys….one looked like he could have been in the Russian mafia – tall, bald, wore all black, and not friendly seeming, and another who looked equally as sketchy but shorter and kind of a mix of middle-eastern and Amish.  Both of these guys were in street clothes, and none looked like they worked for any professional taxi service.  The first guy we talked to assigned the shorter guy to drive us.

We followed our driver out of the airport and to a black car waiting at the curb. There were no markings on the car saying “Taxi” there was no meter on the dashboard, there was nothing at all that told us that this was an actual valid taxi. Adam and I looked at each other….realizing that this was a bad idea, and Adam said something to the guy about no meter and questioned if this was a real taxi or not.  The guy responded “pre-vat car, pre-vat car” (private car)….ugh, I had a bad feeling about this….but we both hesitantly got in.

At that moment, I was certain that we were going to be driven to some dark alley and murdered, or mugged and left in some ditch, or told to get out of the car with our bags stolen.  We didn’t speak French, we honestly had no idea how to actually get to our room, and Charles de Gaulle was 30-40 min outside of Paris, so this guy could have pretty much taken us anywhere he wanted and we would have had no idea where we were or now to communicate with anyone to get help.

We spent the first few minutes in awkward silence, with all sorts of horrible scenarios racing through my mind, until our driver tried to start up a conversation in his broken English.  I have no idea how, but MMA was brought up, and it was then that Adam was able to form  somewhat of a “hey don’t kill us” bond with this guy over juijitsu/UFC talk for the next 20 or so minutes.  phew….  no muggings or murders for these world travelers!

We finally made it safely to our studio in Paris, ready to start our 5 month long adventure….85 euros poorer, but hey, it got us out of standing in long taxi lines, and possibly getting lost on the metro (little did we know the Parisian metro is actually really easy to navigate as we later found out).

What’s the first thing we did in Paris, you ask?  took a long nap!