This was written for a memior exercize in creative writing. This story is true, sadly. It happened during a trip I took to Europe the summer between middle school and high school. I went with my middle school Spanish teacher. The trip was a lot of fun. But I hate Paris.
The bus pulled up to a hotel that wasn’t very big, it was tall and skinny and situated on the corner of a busy Paris street. No one really cared all that much about how it looked though, we just wanted to get off that damn bus! Sitting through a bus ride from Callie to Paris is not fun. It is an insanely long ride and by the time you arrive in the outskirts of Paris you wouldn’t care if your hotel were right there along the highway, you just want to get off of the bus.
Not only was the outside of the hotel small, the inside was even smaller. The lobby could barely hold the 30 of us who were there, the 15 people from Portland and the 15 people from California. We managed two people, with their luggage, into the tiny elevator. The rest of us had to take the stairs. We had to walk up a narrow, winding staircase to get to our rooms. And my room was on the fifth floor. I was sharing a room with Kara and Jennifer. We arrived at our door and fiddled around with the key. None of us were ever any good at opening hotel room doors. We were even worse in Spain where we had the swipe card keys, but that’s another story.
Jennifer finally managed to get the door open and we all walked into this narrow hallway that was mostly taken up with large, empty bookcases. We squeezed our way into the main room, dragging our luggage behind us. We passed the door to the bathroom, but no one looked in, we just wanted to collapse on the beds. Well, we thought we could just collapse on the beds. Please note the plural. We walked into the main room and saw that all it contained was one queen bed and a large desk. There was a cot set up beside the bed, squeezed into the space between the bed and the desk. One bed, one cot, three people. An interesting predicament.
After staring at the bed and cot for a few minutes, we decided that Kara would sleep on the cot and Jennifer and I would share the bed. I got the side next the wall, and consequently, I was the one who had to answer the phone, it was right above my head. Finally I had to go to the bathroom so I squeezed my way back through the hall to the bathroom door. I walked in and was very surprised and very upset to find that it was a little larger than our room. There was a huge bathtub, a sink with a nice counter around it, tons of towel racks overflowing with towels, and the two toilets! I can’t imagine why anyone would need to use two toilets at once, but if anyone wanted to, they could come to our room. I screeched, and Jennifer and Kara came running. Well, they came as fast as they could get by the bookcases. They were just as outraged as I was about the size of our bathroom. We were debating if one of us should sleep in the tub when Agar knocked on the door and told us that we were going to go and check out the Metro stop near our hotel and see if there was any place nearby to have dessert.
The group from Portland met in the cramped lobby and headed out into the dark Paris night. It was about midnight, and even though everyone was a little tired, no one wanted to go to bed. The Metro stop wasn’t that far from the hotel and after we poked around in the underground tunnel and laughed at all the odd ads for awhile we emerged into the dark night once again. On our way to the Metro stop we had passed a McDonalds, our self-designated eating place for the whole trip. Since there’s a McDonalds everywhere you go, we decided that it was a good place to eat, and the waiters usually spoke English, we got rather used to eating there. Our group went into the deserted restaurant and took over a few tables. McFlurry’s for everyone, the workers there loved us; we were the funny Americans who couldn’t speak French. Finally around one in the morning, we decided to go back to the smallest hotel on the face of the earth to try to sleep. We were standing at the door of our hotel, talking about what time we should wake up in the morning, when we heard a yell and something was thrown our way. Suddenly everyone was crying and coughing.
“We’ve been tear-gassed!” one of the mother yelled through her tears. We all groaned and hurried into the lobby. What a warm welcome to Paris!