Twilight zone, somewhere in France

This is my story of getting stuck in what seemed to be The Twilight Zone while traveling in France a couple decades ago. Travel today is pretty easy. With the internet today you can do price research, budget your trip, make reservations, check the accommodations on line , print boarding passes, and even do language translations. When I started traveling abroad in the 80's, it was really seat of the pants. I can't imagine what it was like in the 60's!

When I travelled in Europe in the 80's, I carried a bag the size of a basketball full of convertors. Not only voltage convertors but the AC plug ends were different in each country. In most countries, they had multiple convertors for voltage and two or three different plugs for a phone line. I may have had thirty different convertors. So in the mid-80's when I carried a computer (see my blog on my Compaq luggable) I needed all these convertors to plug my analog modem into so that I could get email or send a file.  It was a nightmare. But I digress from my story.

So, I find myself in Paris one week and I have a meeting in the suburbs with one of our distributors. I had called him the previous week and arranged the meeting. I confirmed the previous day and he gave me instructions on which train to take. The metro stop was just outside my hotel and I grabbed a train map and figured out my route. No problem I thought. I was traveling with a colleague and we headed out. The plan was to get to the train stop and call our contact who would pick us up. My contact had explained that the train stopped in a shopping center.

Where do I put the coins?

We made our way to the shopping center by way of a couple train changes. He was correct, the train stopped underneath what we would call a mall. Up two levels to the mall and we looked for a phone to call him. We found one in a minute and I pulled out my contacts phone number. I looked all over the phone for a place to put in the coins. There did not appear to be any place to put money in, very weird. Well, we thought, this must be a special French phone that is only for locals. Off we went in search of another phone. On the level below, we found another phone. Same issue, there did not appear to be a place to put money. We started asking people walking by to explain what the situation was. Nobody spoke english. Finally, after a dozen or so tries, a young gal tried to assist. She pulled out a card and showed me that you needed this special card to make calls, the phones would not take money of any type.  Well great, so where can I get a card?  She said the Post Office sells them. Lucky for me there was a Post Office in the mall. Off we go to the post office only to find it is closed and opens in an hour.  Waiting in front of the Post Office, I finally find a guy who speaks good english and he explains that the government had been getting rid of all pay phones for some time.

So, an hour goes by and by now I am getting very late for my meeting and the Post Office opens. Of course, there are twenty people waiting in front of me by the time I get in. As I am waiting in line, I notice there is a phone booth in the Post Office. It looks different than the other phones I saw. I look closer, it has a coin slot, WTF!  So, you have to buy a card to use phones outside the Post Office but the one inside , where you buy the cards, takes coins. That's a government at work if I ever saw one.

I call my contact and apologize for being late, he says he will pick me up in five minutes.  OK, things are looking up now, well not so fast. We head for the nearest exit and head out, right into the parking garage. Back into the mall we go to the next exit. Same thing, into a parking garage. We try two more exits on that level, then head upstairs. After 25 minutes, we cannot seem to find an exit to the street. Every exit goes to the parking garages. Finally, we head into the garage and decide to venture further. We follow a car exiting and find out that there is no way to actually enter the mall on foot. You have to drive into the garage to enter the mall. When we get outside, we see that the mall itself is several hundred yards from any other building and was built with no foot traffic in mind.

We get picked up by our contact who gets a good laugh out of our story. I knew him pretty well by that time so I got the benefit of the doubt. I mean, would you do business with a company that sends a representative that can't figure out how to make a phone call or exit a building?

The moral of the story; when you travel to a foreign country nothing is quite as it seems. It may look the same but trust me, it's different.