Le premier jour: le voyage vers Paris (merde!)

This was our travel day to Paris, which is only 3 hours away by direct TGV train service. Just in case we would miss the hearty German cuisine in the next seven days, we had lunch at the LOC cafe in the Karlsruhe train station before departing on the 13:30 train.

Everyone was in a jolly mood when the train arrived at the track only 3 minutes late (which is not bad for SNCF service). But a crisis broke out as soon as the train departed from the station. Seats 73 to 78 in car 15 were double-booked (so we thought). The train manager, who was a DB employee (it is a puzzle to me why the train manager on a French TGV train was a Deutsche Bahn employee) emerged on the scene and quickly sorted out the problem.

Merde! Our (by now) not-so-jolly party was holding a ticket valid for travel on December 28, not December 26. Perhaps I was so out-of-practice in traveling that I had forgotten to check the departure date when I purchased the ticket from a DB travel office nearly two months ago. So we stepped aside while the train manager was attending to other crises.

About half way between Karlsruhe and Strasbourg, France (the next stop), the train manager re-emerged. "We have to deal with the ticket here as this was issued by Deutsche Bahn" (which meant she was not going to kick us off the train and left us scrambling in Strasbourg). She asked for our Bahn Cards (which give our family a 25% discount on all DB tickets for about 60€ a year), tapped a few keys on her handheld ticket machine with her stylus, and quoted me the cost for making up the price difference for six second-class tickets traveling to Paris on December 26. Well, the additional cost was about 2€ per minute of travel. Since it was not priceless, my Mastercard took care of it. After this was settled, the printout of the receipts came to about a meter long.

"Unfortunately there are no more seats in the second-class cabin. You can stand in the bistro car..." But based on the hints that we received afterwards, we decided that taking seats 21 to 26 in the first class car would be a better option than hindering the food and drink sales in the dining car.

The Gare de l'Est station in Paris was chaotic at the time of our arrival, but we found our way to the adjacent Métro station. The queue of impatient tourists in front of the ticket counter was long. Being an impatient tourist, I went to a ticket vending machine to purchase a carnet of 10 tickets for 11,40€ (instead of 1,60€ for an individual ticket). This time, my Mastercard, which does not have a smart chip on it, did not work (so much for the "for everything else, there's Mastercard" slogan). But my German ATM card did.

To my relief, our hotel booking was for six nights beginning on December 26. At the height of the financial crisis in early November, I could get an excellent Internet-booking rate for a two bedroom suite at the Fraser Suite Hotel in La Défense for this busy tourist period. Although La Défense is outside Paris, it is the city's business district. Arc de Triomphe, Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Musée du Louvre are all a few Métro stops away. When we got off the Métro at the Esplanade de La Défense station, it took us a long while to find the hotel. The confusing signage did not help either: there were two signs, which were 5 meters apart and 250 meters from the hotel, directing clueless tourists to the hotel in opposite directions. Merde!