A Trip On the Metro

We were dropped in Paris at the enormous Gare du Nord station. Talk about a maze of interconnecting systems. We then had to make our way to downtown, via the Metro, the Paris equivalent of London's Tube. The Metro is a bit more complicated than the Tube for a couple of reasons: the signage pointing out the connections is worse, there is no staff at each gate to provide helpful direction and the frequent information points are generally unmanned and several different lines apparently under different management make up the system. Unlike the Tube, there is a also a noticecable lack of escalators, so there are lot of stairs to negotiate. Throw the language barrier on top of that, and it gets interesting, although it is still manageable, provided you have the one commodity we didn't have much of: time. After finding a ticket office to buy one-day passes, we eventually made our way downtown to the island of San Martin in the middle of Paris, emerging in the back of St. Chapelle about a block away from Notre Dame.