Adventures on a Paris Subway

We finished our stay in the Pigalle area by having lunch at an outside cafe, ham and cheese omelets with french fries (but here they just call them fries).  I had heard that it would cost more to eat in the open air in front of a cafe, but so far I have seen no difference in price no matter where we sit.  The other nice thing is that you don't have to worry about tipping here, since it is not common.  But the pricing is weird, since some things are the exact price shown, and others have a tax added.

Speaking of which, how they hell did I get over 20 euros worth of change in my pocket already.  Not only do they have 1 and 2 euro coins, they also have 50, 20, 10, 5, 2 and 1 cent coins as well.  And even though they have 5 and 10 euro bills, they love to pay you change in all coins.  I feel like I'm carrying around an extra 5 pounds in my pockets because of all the coins.

We got back on the metro at Pigalle to head for home, and I used some of my coins to pay for the tickets.  However, it took me nearly 5 minutes to feed all the individual coins into the ticket machine and I kind of held up the line of people wanting to get home.  Unfortunately, in the rush to try and get to metro after the ticket delay, I hadn't notice that two different subway lines crossed paths at this stop - one running East and West, the other running North and South.  I knew where we didn't want to go, so I followed the other sign and it took us to another line.  It wasn't until we were already on the subway and riding to the next stop that I realized we were on the wrong line.  At this point, the "rats caught in a maze" experience began.

First we had to get off at the next stop, then we had to find out how to get to the other side of the platform.  We took that subway back to the Pigalle stop, then we had to get off again and find the other level with the correct subway that would take us back to our apartment.  This was quite the journey as you have to cross up and over the tracks and then back down to the platform on the right side.

We finally got to the right side and the right subway and started our trip back to the apartment.  We survived the trip on our own, didn't have too many problems, and I bought a really nice hat at a little souvenir shop in Pigalle.  Now we have to pack up everything and be ready to leave at 6:00 in the morning for our flight to Porto.  We're almost home to Portugal.