4th: Leaving Agen - Return to Paris

Hardly slept at all last night. I had taken some 24 hour sudafed the day before and I was completely wired. I always overreact to medication, and this time was no different than others.

At 8am, Mrs Smith came to wake us up, but I was already awake. John showered and then we both quickly dressed, stripped the bed, and packed up our things. We dropped of the three children at their riding lesson (Roge) and headed to the gare in Agen.

Adjacent to the gare, in the same building, was a small cafe where we all stopped to have cafe et croissants. There was a strange woman that was exiting when we were entering...she stared at Mr Smith and made a funny movement with her mouth...like she was going to say something but was terrified. It was too funny and was the brunt of much of our breakfast conversation. We speculated about what must have been going on in her mind at that moment. Mr Smith said to her, "Ca va?" and she said nothing so he said next, "No ca va?" and she just stood there stupified. It was hilarious.

So we had our cafe grande, croissants, said our goodbyes. We had a spectacular visit with the Smith family and wished that we'd had more time to spend with them. They'll be coming to the US on the 12th to stay for a month - hopefully we'll get to see them again before they head back to the chateau.

Our train to Bordeaux was an older train, lots of stops along the way. Once in Bordeaux, we swtiched to one of the highpowered bullet trains. My ears ached all the way to Paris. In Paris we exited the Montparnase station and found that we needed to book a hotel for the night. We walked around the station a bit, checking for an internet pub but there was none. There were a few hotels, but it seemed we were in a bit of a red light district of sorts and figured that it wasn't the best place to stay. John's patience was running thinner and thinner so I suggested that we return to the Pont du Neuf cafe where we knew we'd be able to have wine, food, and surf to find a place in which to stay for our last night in Paris.

Pascal wasn't our waiter tonight. Instead we had the rude yound man that we'd had on our first visit to the cafe. (He refused to sell us a pichet of wine because we were "in the wrong room"). We ordered some fries, an omlette, and a small pichet of wine, and then logged on. I wrote to a number of ads posted on the Paris version of Craigslist and amazingly one person wrote back immediately. While he didn't have a room for us in one of his rentals, he kindly offered to help find us a place for the night. He found us a room in the Hotel Metronome (Marais/Bastille border) for a meager 65€ a night. It had a double bed, a twin bed, a private bathroom. What more could we want on short notice on a Saturday night in Paris? Most places require a two night booking on a weekend so we were really in luck!

The room was on the 3rd floor (deuxieme etage in France) and was on the cheesy side. It was faily clean and didn't smell like smoke so I was rather happy. We left our suitcases and headed out almost immediately. The clerk asked to hold our key for us and I felt very weird about that. It wasn't until later that I realized that we had paid for the room in cash, received no receipt, and then he had the key. I panicked and feared that we might have lost not only our cash, but our bags. That thought loomed in my mind for most of the night.

So our last night in Paris was a bit strained. John's patience was thin as it took us a few hours to find a place (not unexpected), and we hadn't done ANY shopping at all for friends and family. It was getting late and all of the major department stores were closed (Le Bon Marche, Samaratain, etc). We walkd the Marais, and luckily a few places were open, however, there really wasn't anything that we saw that we wanted to buy for anyone. Most items are "made in China" and bringing a gift from France should be FROM France, made in France, by REAL French people.

We gave up and decided it was time to grab a bite. John's blood sugar dangerously low, and he on the verge of a nuclear meltdown. We tried to find a street parallel to Rivoli that houses a good number of Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants, but we didn't find it. We did find a nice veggie restaurant in the Marais (Le Marais) and dined on the following:

Soy Protein Lasagne 9€
Tea 10€ (yes, TEN EUROS...insane!)
Pizza Napolitaine 9€

The service was slow, very slow, the pizza came to the table with the champignons that I was so looking forward to, and then there were oodles of people smoking adjacent to us, despite the fact that we were in the no-smoking area of the restaurant. Can't really recommend going back to this one ever again. The waiter was friendly enough, but the rest of the experience just didn't cut it.

We headed back to the hotel room and our desk clerk was there watching the Miss France competition. He unlocked the door promptly and let us in. I was relieved that all was fine and that we hadn't "been taken" for a ride. We asked for a 6:30AM wake up call even though I was fairly certain we wouldn't need it: I never sleep well before a day of travel. No idea where that behaviour stems from, but I's been that way my entire life.

I left the computer on so that if I got up in the middle of the night I'd be able to check on the time. I stayed up for about an hour writing in my blog and then crawled under the sheets. I didn't bother to even take off my clothes as the room was cold and I figured that the cold would be just one more thing that would keep me up that night.