2017 Eurotrip – Day 1: Getting Scammed in Paris and Struggling to Break a 500-Euro Bill

2017 Eurotrip – Day 1: Getting Scammed in Paris and Struggling to Break a 500-Euro Bill

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They say that you haven’t really experienced the real Paris until the moment you get scammed. Well, I’m embarrassed to say that that’s exactly what happened to us about three hours after we’d touched down in Paris, France.

So we’ve started our journey in Manila on the 3^rd of May at 1:20 PM and landed in Paris at around 07:10 AM. Doesn’t seem like a lot, but that’s actually like thirty-six hours of travel and while we were very excited, we also were pretty much beat.   Granted, A and myself have been to all sorts of sketchy places in the past and while we do consider ourselves to be somewhat smart about these things (we do live in mega Manila, after all), we’d never had to navigate an entirely Western city after that long of a travel time.

After getting past immigration and taking out some money from the ATM, I finally managed to set up my international data SIM card from SIM Options (I got the one from this website but you can get it cheaper from Lazada). We Google Mapped our way out of the airport onto the train that would take us to our hostel in the city. We had to transfer onto a local train at Gare du Nord and maybe because we were tired and sleepless, not to mention itching for a shower, we could not find our exit to the local metro. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we probably had been walking all over the massive station for about forty-five minutes, lugging around our luggage through all three floors looking for that darned exit.

Well why didn’t you just ask for directions, then? We did, but none of the people who bothered stopping for us spoke English. We did manage to find some kind of a guard who I think was there for the tourists and while he seemed to try his best to point us to the right direction, he didn’t speak English either.

So we were two girls standing on one corner of Gare du Nord with our bags, sleepless and looking lost. We must’ve looked prime for the picking for that particular scammer. A local man in a beanie approached us and asked us where we wanted to go. We showed him that we were meant to take this particular train. He nodded and motioned for us to follow him, which we did. He led us to a big map of the train lines and showed us where we were currently and where the station (Jaures) we were meant to get out to. He then briskly led us through a couple of gates and stopped at a ticketing machine where he pushed a couple of buttons and gave us two tickets that came out of the machine. And that was when he asked us for money. When he asked us to give him forty Euros, my spider sense tingled (way late, I know) and I gestured to Ana to just give him a twenty just so he would leave us alone because he seemed to be getting aggravated at each second that we weren’t forking over the money.

As soon as he got the cash, he hastily walked away and left us with the tickets that we later found were already used. Welcome to Paris, I guess. You’d best believe that after this incident, it was all “No” from A and myself at anybody who’d venture to come near us during the whole of our Europe trip.

After realizing that we got scammed, it was like a veil was lifted out of our eyes. Somehow after that ordeal, we very quickly managed to find that elusive exit (it was at the very end of the tunnel that we initially thought led to a mall of some sort) and managed to get to Generator hostel with very little incident.

Generator Hostel Private Room, Paris

" aperture="aperture" />Pretty sweet lodgings at Generator Hostel, Paris

After checking in, we immediately took baths and decided to settle our next problem: how to break the 500Euro bill that A got from the local bank (BPI) in Manila because no one (and I mean NO ONE, not even the hostel when we checked in) would accept it for anything. When I took out cash from the ATM at the airport, I was surprised that the cash coughed up a wad of 20Euro bills. Apparently this is a thing in the big European cities because the drug cartels counterfeit the big denominations and most establishments would just rather turn away the customer rather than deal with the big bill.

Generator Hostel, Paris

" aperture="aperture" />the gorgeous view from our room

We tried to exchange it at the nearby Western Union but they said no. As a back up, we Googled a nearby local Parisian bank because a forum on TripAdvisor said that the local banks in Paris have to accept the bill and break it for you as they can confirm that the note is not fake. We hopped on a train and because we had rotten luck on that first day, it rained. On top of that, when we got out of the station, the bank was frakkin’ closed. We spotted an HSBC across the street and tried there but to no avail; the teller said that they would only accommodate requests from account holders.

Generator Hostel, Paris

" aperture="aperture" />the Western Union is on the right side

Paris, France

" aperture="aperture" />where i sat down while waiting for A to finish at the Western Union

As we were getting somewhat desperate and because it was already near the closing time of the local banks, we decided to just walk around the area and look for shops that could possible break the bill. Luckily, we somehow found ourselves in a shopping street so it had just been a matter of looking for a Longchamp store as A had planned on getting a couple of bags for her mom at the tail end of our Eurotrip. Well, needs must so she had to reorganize her plans and buy the two bags at the start of our trip instead. Luckily the attendant at the Longchamp store managed to scrape enough change to break A’s 500Euro bill.

Paris, France

" aperture="aperture" />random snaps while looking for an open bank

Paris, France

" p310="p310" />one of the squares we stumbled upon after eating at the creperie

After what felt like an extremely trying first day, we went into the first café we saw that had crepes on the menu. We had a savory crepe (which I apparently didn’t take a photo of, LOL) and then just walked around some more before making our way back to the hostel to catch up on some sleep. It was around five in the afternoon, LOL.

Stay tuned for Day 2.