The pickup at Gare Montparnasse train station was supposed to be easy: call our host from a payphone and wait 20 minutes in a designated area.
Simple right? Nope.
The payphone near our meeting point didn’t take coins. I hadn’t anticipated this. Turns out, it only accepted prepaid calling cards and credit cards. With only a handful of small change in my pocket (no large bills), I was out of luck.
“OK, no big deal” I thought, I’ll just buy a phone card at the newsstand in the train station. Nope – wrong again! Because I didn’t have a pin and chip credit card (not common in the US), I would have to spend at least $20 to get a phone card, which, on our tight budget, I wasn’t willing to do since we only need it for this one call.
Frustrated, I stormed out of the market and told Beth about my dilemma. I then went out and wondered around the train station until I finally found a payphone that accepted coins on a different level of this MASSIVE train station. I was elated when I finally found one.
So, I made the call. I went back and waited for our pick up but no one came. I called again. The hostel host said we were in the wrong place and started to give me lip about following directions and in the middle – wouldn’t you know it – the phone call cutoff. We discovered that, .50 euro only gets you about 30 seconds of talk time. At this point I was starting to run out of change, but I had enough to call again. With the language barrier & and general confusion over where we were supposed to meet, this phone call process repeated itself multiple times nearly sucking up all of our change before we finally got everything straightened out.
I’m not sure why but on more than once occasion I’ve encountered phones in Paris and Italy that do not accept change. It’s caused us to miss pick ups and it’s frustrating to say the least. That is why I recommend buying an international calling card for your trip. It doesn’t have to be anything expensive, just enough to make quick phone calls if needed. We lost over three hours of our afternoon in Paris and it could’ve all been avoided if we had a calling card with us. We now always travel with one just in case we run into another similar situation.
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7 comments
One can not avoid frustrations while travelling, but if you are going to be hosted by someone, it is better to agree on time and place of pick up instead of relying on the use of telephone
@Krystal, Couldn’t agree more. Anytime we’ve had to call for a pickup it has always been a nightmare. In this situation, there policy was to do pickups and not give out the hostel address, because it was in an apartment building and it wasn’t a typical style hostel.
Don’t use pick ups. They are for wimps. Walk to the hostel instead.
@td, Trust me, we would have preferred to walk, but the hostel would not release its address as part of its policy (basically, it was an apartment turned into a hostel dorm room; therefore there is no front desk to check in). So we had no choice but to wait for the pickup.
Sorry. You hardly see any kind of payphone at all in the States now. I know that the French can seem cold, especailly in Paris, however, I bet if you had asked someone would have used their cell phone for you. Once, lost in Paris as a young woman, I met a stragner that tried to help me find an address on a map. She actually ended up taking me to office I was looking for by car. I’ll never forget that. My husband’s Uncle the architect on that train station by the way. It is big and modern. His family has an empty apartment around the corner. Wish I could have helped!
indeed, if you have asked someone to borrow a phone (and explained your problem), chances are you’d be helped without problem. just don’t approach one who seems in a rush and instead find a friendly face. 🙂
We were lucky enough to have received a 25 minutes calling card with our Eurail pass. I never thought I’d need it but turns out, I used it all up.
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