Metro Problems

Karin and I decided a few weeks ago that we are going to print off our blogs and make them into journals after we get home. We have our journals that we can use to record more of our thoughts and our feelings, but the things we write in our blogs are the events and stories that we not only want to remember, but things that we would typically email home about. Keeping them on our blog makes it easier than writing individual emails to everyone.

So we spent the evening at our Professor's apartment. We ate a traditional French meal prepared by Professor Springer, who does something with the BYU program...I think, but I'm not completely sure. It resembles shepherds pie and was delicious! We proceeded to have a music sharing party, which included some French/American Disney sing-along time, naturally.

Karin and I suffered through being called "interesting" by Patterson (Compliment? Insult? I don't know). He was amazed to hear that eating chocolate was on Karin's top 5 favorite things to do, and was very likely my top 1 thing to do. They laughed at us, then gave us a baguette and a chocolate bar for our ride home....which turned out to be a little longer than was expected.

We had already had enough difficulty on the metros today. Jill, Karin, and I did one of our walks at the flea markets in the ghettos of Paris. On the way there, our metro decided to screech to a stop throwing us all basically onto each other, and then all the lights went out. We heard some unidentifiable screams which we then identified as our own, then fumbled around in the dark for a minute to find each other. This then prompted the following conversation:

Allison: Who would've guessed that we would've died in a metro in the middle of Paris...
Karin: What if when you died, people saw you in your casket in the same position that you died in?
Jill: We should've colored my hair before we left...my roots are so long. I don't want to look like this in my casket.

Needless to say, less then a minute later the lights turned back on and we were on our way. But back to our evening metro problems...So Karin and I left the Patterson's, chocolate bar in hand. This is a path we trek multiple times a week without issues. We were sitting on the metro, absorbed in our chocolate and laughing at how quickly we scared everyone off of the train, as most people on the full car exited just at the next stop. We continued on our way when I noted an unfamiliar metro stop that we were at. "Commerce" hmmmm...Commerce, that doesn't sound familiar. Interesting, I swear I knew all of the stops! Did they put a new one in recently? That must be it, because I know Commerce wasn't there yesterday... I mentioned to Karin that I thought that was so weird that I had never noticed that stop there before. We looked around confusedly for a minute until Karin said "Oooh, that is because we are going the wrong direction!" How does that happen? Getting on the wrong train when it is one that you have done so many times before is like leaving Salt Lake and going to Bountiful instead of Provo! I mean the signs are right there! We laughed for a while and wondered if they had moved some of the lines around because we knew we walked the same route as always! We found our way to the correct connecting metro and then after looking at a few signs it clicked...No, we were not heading in the wrong direction. We were just too absorbed in our chocolate to get off at the right stop! We made it to the right station and tried to get off the train car, but then the buttons to open the door weren't working! Then the train started going again, and we were just about headed back to Ecole Militaire, but then thankfully the train stopped before it was out of the station and the doors all flew open!

So half a baguette and 3/4 of a Milka bar later, we finally have made it home safely. Thank goodness for our metro maps that still come in handy after more than a month! Unfortunately, this story probably won't be quite as funny to the average reader as it was to Karin and I, but we always find a way to laugh ourselves silly at nothing at all! :)