Back to school again... (Part 4,2 )

At the end of my previous entry I said I had a lot of problems in Paris. First of all, no one knows English in Paris which was very suprising for me. It is a city that is visited by many tourists and it is strange that people dont know English. Most of the time, that was problematic for us. For example, we asked a ticket for metro that is valid during the day and we thought that the instruction was pretty clear. We used the ticket three times and it opened the doors so we didnt realise that we have a problem until some guys stopped us in the enterance. They took our ticket that we had been using all day and put it in a machine, checked  and then they told us that we were doing sth illegal by using the ticket everywhere which can be used only once. They asked for our passports and wanted us to pay a punishment. I said, "Sorry but I dont think I willl pay because there is a communication problem here". There was only one guy who can speak English (luckily), he was not that good at English but at least we understood each other :) I rejected to pay and explained the situation because it was not our fault. Fortunately, I could convince the man and he let us go. 

If you dont want to experince that kind of problems with tourists in your country, the people to interract with foreigners should know the international language , English or you should find another way to make the things clear. For example, if our ticket is for only one usage, it shouldnt open the doors but it did. What is more , for example, the signs that show directions was so complicated we couldnt understand anything. Almost everthing was in French and also in restaurants or even cafes or pubs which are so close to the most important touristic attractions, no one knows English so we had to use our body language a lot :)

Another bad thing befell us in the hotel. One day we came to our hotel very late. When we arrive there were some drunk guys waiting at the reception. We arrived, took our key and took our way to our room. Then later we realised that these guys follow us.We went to our room as quick as possible and I locked the door immediately. I didnt want to scare Hatice but I knew that sth unpleasent was going to happen so I was ready. I told Hatice to be silent and I heard them coming. When they came to our floor, they begin to knock our door telling silly things in English with their bad German accent. Hatice was so afraid and we were alone on the last floor of the hotel and the guys outside were four persons knocking continuously to our door. If they broke the key of the  door we had nowhere to run, so I put a lot of chairs accordingly that even they open they cannot get in for a while. The only thing we could do is to call the reception but the guy didnt understand a word in English so we didnt and after some time drunk guys left but nevertheless I couldnt sleep and I was guarding with a wooden coat-hanger against any possible attack. It was a bad night.

The other day while we were in a metro, we witnessed someone stealing a girl's money from her pocket. He was a black, bald, huge guy with tattooes on his arms so we had to keep quiet because he looked dangerous. What is more we also experinced the same situation like the girl :( and we dont want to remember it.

Finally the last day, we picked our things and left the hotel .

While waiting for the train to go to airport people began to run towards us.  The crowd was like a herd which had seen a lion :) and we heard some announcements (of course in French) but didnt understand. After all the crowd passed on us we saw a soldier running with a gun toward us. We just stopped raised our hands and tried to seem nice :) We asked what happened but he just pushed us upstairs. When we went up we learned from another tourist  that the train which was about to come to the peron we had been waiting had a bomb. Then we immediately left the place. After that, all the trains to airport direction were canceled. Somehow we found the way to go to airport but we went to wrong side of  airport. To understand that we were on the wrong side took too much time because we couldnt understand each other with the workers at airport. Finally,when we found the airport we went to our company's gate and begin to wait but at the last moment we learned that it was not the right place because  it was not written right on the screen. By the way, the day before we left, by mistake all of our pictures in Paris were deleted, we were really really upset and didnt go anywhere on the last day.

After all this misfortune, when I got on the plane I was expecting to have plane crash, it sounded so ordinary at that time especially when we had turbulence on air and I was thinking how to survive if the plane somehow lands on an inhabited island and if I am still alive. However , it didnt happen but our plane landed very late. We could be able to go to central station but we couldnt catch the last train to Vordingborg. I was upset, depressed, tired, sleepless and hungry.

The only thing that made me feel a bit better was to see a lot of Danish people around with their usual innocent look. I realised that I missed Denmark and all Danish people even though we have nothing to do with each other. It was nice and relieving  to see their smiling innocent faces. I felt very welcome. However, we had to wait 5 hours in the freezing cold central station in that situation. It was like punishment and when we took the first train to Vordingborg I said "I am at home" and decided not to go anywhere for a long time ...