At the Grey­hound Sta­tion, back in Ottawa

And here we are, back in Ottawa.

We left Nantes on Fri­day night, tak­ing the last train to Paris. The plan was to sleep for a few hours and catch an early RER train to Roissy CDG since we were due to fly at 11:00 am. We were in luck and had found a nice and cheap hotel… a few min­utes’ walk from the Eif­fel Tower, for CA$70. No kidding.

By the time we got to the hotel, it was already mid­night and we were both exhausted. The room looked just fine at first glance: we put our back­packs down, checked the bath­room out quickly and sat on the bed. A minute later, Feng opened the win­dow to see if we could actu­ally see the Eif­fel Tower from the room. He pushed the cur­tains back off the win­dow and opened it an inch or two, then quickly closed it when he saw there were mos­qui­toes fly­ing out­side. The hotel neon was right below the win­dow, attract­ing all kinds of bugs. “Shit we thought, no fresh air tonight!” I closed the win­dow shut and instinc­tively, we both looked up to the ceil­ing to see if there was a fan. Oh, there was one alright. There was also a huge cloud of bugs, both mos­qui­toes and midges, clearly vis­i­ble on the white ceiling.

We looked at each other, sighed and went back down­stairs to the recep­tion. I explained that we were invaded by bugs but I could see the recep­tion­ist was not tak­ing me seri­ously. I begged him to come have a look. He rum­maged through the draw­ers to find bug spray and fol­lowed us, slightly annoyed.

I pushed the door open, slightly annoyed myself, and let him in. “Ah oui, ah oui!” he exclaimed in sur­prise, sud­denly real­iz­ing I was not a drama-queen after all. We stared at each other, unsure of what to do. For­tu­nately, after 6 weeks in France, I had my French­ness back and I could try to solve the prob­lem as diplo­mat­i­cally as pos­si­ble. Indeed, the key to nego­ti­at­ing with French is to find a com­mon enemy, to take it easy and to not offend any­one in order to hope­fully work out a suit­able solu­tion for both parts.

Find­ing a com­mon enemy was easy: the recep­tion­ist and I fig­ured the house­keeper must have left the win­dow opened for too long — that alone took 20 min­utes. I admit­ted the room looked per­fectly clean but for the bugs, he stated that it was indeed very clean. He said it had never hap­pened before, I con­curred it must be the very first time. We both apol­o­gized for no rea­son and blamed the housekeeper.

The recep­tion­ist first offered to spray the room with bug repel­lent. How­ever, we had to leave the room for at least 30 min­utes. I pointed out it was well past mid­night and that we had an early flight to catch. Besides, we clearly could not open the win­dow since more bugs would fly in, and I stressed it was not rec­om­mended to sleep in a tiny room right after hav­ing it sprayed like that.

Then, I asked if we could have another room. He ran back down­stairs to check but unfor­tu­nately, the hotel was full. I could see Feng was get­ting annoyed and I was get­ting tired myself.

I explained our sit­u­a­tion, the early flight and all, and stated we were def­i­nitely not going to sleep in that room. I asked if we could have a refund. Puz­zled, the recep­tion­ist ran his hand in his hair. “But you will have to see the boss, I can’t give you a refund”. I knew very well we would never see the boss nor have our money back.

Ten­ta­tively, I asked if he knew other hotels in the street. Sud­denly, he gloated: “let me call the head office, we have another hotel in the neigh­bour­hood, they may have a room for you to take instead of that one!” I trans­lated for Feng who looked back at me, most con­cerned. “Duh, isn’t that the best solution?”

We all ran back down­stairs at the recep­tion and he made the call. In all fair­ness, the recep­tion­ist was on our side. While there was indeed a room left at the other hotel, the per­son on the phone was clearly annoyed. I under­stood that since we had booked online, we had paid a much lower price for the room and that the actual price was pretty high (around EUR165, accord­ing to the web­site I checked later). But ten min­utes later, it was a deal: we had a room in the other hotel.

The other hotel turned out to be even closer to the Eif­fel Tower, two min­utes from École Mil­i­taire, rue du Gros Cail­lou. We also had the biggest room, with four beds. Noth­ing fancy yet at 1:30 am, we were relieved to have a place to sleep and to shower.

We ate a bit, took a shower and walked to the Eif­fel Tower (we had to!). We had barely slept for four hours when the alarm rang — good thing we heard it, we never got our wake up call. I can barely remem­ber tak­ing the sub­way, the RER and get­ting to Roissy. We must have done it right though: we some­how arrived in Ottawa.

Related arti­cles:

1. Sights of Paris (Part II)
2. Paris doesn’t have to be expen­sive —Tips from a For­mer French
3. The Word Is Collapsing
4. The Bean-Shaped Baby
5. Europe in our Eyes
6. A Secret Affair