Arrival in Paris

After my final breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express in Marseille, I checked out at 10.00 and walked across the road to the St Charles Station to catch the 10.45 TGV to Paris. My reserved window seat was on the upper deck where lots of luggage was already stored since the train had started in Nice.
The train passed through rolling countryside, occasionally crossing the Rhone and the North-South motorway. The sky got cloudier as the train approached Paris, arriving at the Gare de Lyon at 13.50.
After buying a 7-day RATP Pass, I had lunch at Le Train Bleu, the very ornate restaurant in the Station. Afterwards, I took the Metro to Madeleine on the new LIne 14 which doesn't have train drivers, and then Line 12 to Front Populaire near Aubervilliers, a 20 minute journey from Madeleine, a journey I'd do often over the following month.
The 2-star easyHotel was across the road from the Metro station and next door to the Paris 2024 office which was called The Pulse. The bedroom was basic with no telephone, table or chair but the bathroom was OK with a walk-in shower and the double-bed was comfortable. The manager gave me the largest room since I was there for a month, and it was quiet.
The hotel was only a few years old, having being built when the district was redeveloped from being light-industrial in a working class, left-wing, and immigrant district just north of the Peripherique. Opposite the hotel was a square around which there was a boulangerie, supermarket, and a couple of restaurants and bars. There was a university campus on the road north towards the Stade de France. The station was also new compared to the traditional Metro stations in the centre of Paris.Read more