J'ai un crise avec les Americains

This past weekend we traveled to Reims, France. Reims is the capital of the Champagne region, which is the reason we chose the random destination. The weekend started out with an epic fail travel wise. First, we read the military time wrong and stood on the wrong platform while our train pulled out of the station, then the power on the new train went out for about ten minutes, which was terrifying. After the power came back on we were still sitting there for about 15 minutes. When we finally arrived in Reims, a full two hours after our original arrival time, the buses in the city had stopped running. But honestly, in what kind of city do the buses stop running at 8:45pm? We decided to walk the 20 minutes to the hostel from the train station, which wouldn’t have created problems if the directions the hostel had sent us weren’t horrifically wrong. Without a map we headed off towards a town called Betheny and the bus stop Comete on the K route. The problems was that our stop was called Comedie and since that name didn’t exist on the route we were told to follow, we decided that it must have been a typo and we walked, what turned out to be about 6 km to the bus route Comete to realize it wasn’t accurate.

Frustrated, tired, afraid, and with sore feet we turned around and walked back in the direction we came. A little after midnight a young French man stopped and asked us if we were okay, Erin took the reigns and asked him if he know where our hostel was. I’ll never forget the look on his face we he realized how lost and far we still were. He called someone on the phone and in a panic said in his rushed French, “I have a crisis with the Americans.”

About twenty minutes later our French friend, Benoit had convinced us to let him drive us to our hostel. He drove half of us to the hostel and then picked up the remaining two at the alleyway we met him by. We went to bed after freaking out about how we let the previous four hours occur. Honestly, we got in a freaking car with a random French man. How stupid. But we were so grateful and relieved to have made it safely that all we could do was laugh uncontrollably in our hostel room.

Saturday we headed to the Notre-Dame Cathedral, which used to be the location of the coronation for French Kings. The cathedral was gorgeous. It was full of enormous, colorful, and beautiful stained glass. We headed to a tour of a champagne cellar, which came with three free glasses as a tasting. We found a park where we goofed off for three-quarters of an hour before grabbing dinner and riding on a two-story carousel! We hung out in the hostel, playing pool for a while before meeting up with some other MUDECers and going out to a bar.

Sunday, we checked out the basilique, went to a couple of museums, and had lunch at a delicious Indian restaurant in the town center. I headed to the train station and sat with some of the other MUDECers while my friends checked out a final museum. Our train ride and transportation in general, were in comparison seamless and we arrived safely at home around 10pm.
Pictures will be up sometime on Tuesday and I’m headed to Dublin for the weekend, so make sure to come back! xoxo