Beginning of 10-Day Break in France

Let me begin by saying this week was probably the most amazing and eye-opening week of my life. We had crazy transportation adventures, days of service and learning about the true meaning of helping others in need and the power of suffering, strengthening of faith, and bonding not only with people from all around the world but with other students. I am so blessed and thankful to be attending such a wonderful school and that our little group of Franciscan students are part of a universal and worldwide church running a marathon through life that we're all in together. And I have more hope then I've ever had before of winning that race :)

Our 10-day break began on Thursday evening, as our weekend excursions usually begin, with overnight travel. We were able to get our reservations from the ticket machine this time, which were 5 euro seats like before but we managed to find an open couchette with one other person, and we stayed there the whole night without being kicked out! The night train took us to Zurich, Switzerland and from Zurich to Geneve. The Oebb website told us we needed to take a bus to Lyon and a train from there would take us to Marseilles (South France) which was where we were going to be staying that night. We made our hostel reservation for the night so we were all set. Well, instead of taking a bus which was going to take awhile, we were told we could catch a train to Lyon. We found when the train to Lyon was leaving, and got food and did a little clothes shopping during our hour and a half layover. We caught the train which was about a half hour delay. Well, turns out we got on the wrong train. About an hour into the ride Andrea got a little concerned and went to ask the conductor if the train we were on was going to Lyon. Turns out we were headed to Paris. Andrea asked when the next stop was so we could get off, and the conductor answered, "Paris." So we had about a two hour train ride ahead of us and we were headed in the complete opposite direction... to Paris instead of Marseille. The conductor was the nicest man though, he understood it was a mistake that we were on the train to Paris and didn't charge us a fine for the compulsory reservation which is usually about a 100 euro fine. We heard later of people from other groups who did get charged. We were so thankful to that man, he not only didn't charge us, but upon arriving in Paris, walked us through the traffic jam of people to the ticket machine so we could try getting a train reservation for a train back to Marseille. Unfortunantely, the most immediate train to Marseille at 5 was completely full and so was the later train and we couldn't get on the night train to Lourdes either. Instead, we managed to get reservations for a 10:30 train in the morning which would get us to Lourdes about 3:30pm, which was approx. 7 hours earlier than planned. So our plan for the night and the rest of the weekend was not ours to decide... and we needed to find a place to stay for the night in Paris.

We wandered pretty aimlessly for awhile. We were tired and really thrown off obviously. We eventually found a hostel which was pretty disgusting, but we didn't have much of a choice so we booked the last three rooms and attempted to buy some passes for the metro to go see the Eiffel Tower at night. Our credit cards wouldn't work (the machine would only accept coins). Not gonna lie, all of us were not in the best moods. I can recall being extremely frustrating with the whole situation, and being tired didn't help. Nothing seemed to be going right. Well, we didn't have enough change for the metro so we went to the supermarket and bought wine and chocolate chip cookies for a treat to have at the Eiffel Tower but actually more to get change for the metro. We picked up some food, bought our passes and hopped on the metro to the Eiffel Tower. We stopped at a souvenir shop and bought some postcards and a t-shirt (I desperately needed a bum t-shirt since I didn't think to bring an extra pajama shirt from home) and what better place to get one then in Paris! ;) While looking through the t-shirts we met Jackson from Bellingham who was working at the souvenir shop! He told us he was sick of small town America and so he packed up his stuff and moved to France haha. We walked to the Eiffel Tower which was gorgeous and we enjoyed our cookies and wine. At this point, we were quite fine with ending up in Paris. Trains are too unpredictable to get angry when traveling doesn't go as planned :)

We left late from the Eiffel Tower and were in our beds by midnight. We had cold water in the morning in a pretty unpleasant shower and were given coins to get breakfast from the vending machine :/ We chatted with a security guard in as much French as we could, and he helped us find our train we needed to catch to Lourdes. He was very friendly and we could tell he was pleased we were at least trying to speak to him in French :)