The Gypsies of Gare du Nord

I'm going to chronicle my holiday out of order, so I hope that doesn't throw off readers.

Two days before Christmas, we embarked on the Eurostar and left London for Paris. This was the leg of the trip that was "Mum's" - she had made all the reservations, did all the research and had a plan of attack. I would be an interested bystander, with rather limited French.

The train trip was a new experience for me, and it wasn't the twenty minute period that we tracked under the English Channel. Half of the seats in each carriage each faced off in opposite directions, and we would be facing backwards to our direction of travel. This was slightly disconcerting, but since the trip was only two hours long, it would be a passing inconvenience.

And so it was that we emerged from the English Channel and into France. It was a cold, dreary day and the rural fields had a slight grey tinge to them. We zoomed past various little villages, each with their central attraction of the church spire. Eventually the rail track ran parallel to the main highway that went north to Belgium, and then the fields gave way to factories and apartment buildings. We had arrived in Paris.

We were among the last few passengers to get off the train, due to the puzzling ritual of everybody pushing, grunting and urgently trying to get their bags off first. Not being used to this in rural Longreach, I was content to wait my turn. We had quite a walk off the train and into the terminal of Gare du Nord, and I adjusted my beanie and scarf tightly in the five minute walk into the terminal.

Of course, there were hardly any signs in English inside, although I had learnt from the stopover in the airport just a few days previous that I should be looking for a sortie. My phone also told me that we should be looking for a subway line so that we could make our way to our hotel, Bastille Classics, on the Rue de Charonne.

What I experienced however was the Parisian rush hour in full effect. Bodies were flying in every direction, talking into their mobiles, ignoring the masses of people newly arrived from Loundres. It did not help one bit that the designers of the Gare du Nord clearly took inspiration from Salvador Dali, as the surreal layout of the station meant we would be walking around in circles without any sign of a sortie.

I was getting more and more agitated at the prospect of not getting out of the station, and Mum suggested - in the way that only mothers can - that we should find an information desk. And so it was that we walked around in a circle again to find one.

The information desk was located in an extremely busy area of the station, with people lining up so dense that you couldn't swing a cat. I was distracted with my phone translator inexplicably changing from French to Norwegian, and cursed for about twenty seconds as I played with it with one hand, the other hand clutching my luggage like a vice.

Eventually, I looked up and there was no-one in the information area left except for me, Mum and an extremely confused and emotional Japanese man, who had been newly relieved of his luggage.

He looked at us with the strangest look of puzzlement, and could only say, "My luggage? My luggage?"

I asked what could only be regarded as the most stupidly phrased question of all time. "Your luggage? Where is it?"

He waved his hands in exasperation. "Gone! My luggage is gone! My luggage? You know where it went?"

It took about two minutes of back and forward conversation before Mum and I assured the man that we had not taken the luggage. It eventually dawned on us that out of the twenty or so people lining up in the queue for the Information Desk, about seventeen of them were working in coordination in a massive sting. "Those fucking gypsies! I told you so!" said Mum.

A quick rewind. For my thirtieth birthday just two months previously, Mum had given me a wide range of travel safety gear. Belts that strapped around your waist and held cash. Zippers that would only open with a specific five digit code (and presumably self-destructed if you should make a mistake). The only useful device that I bothered to take on holidays was a new camera cord, with "three wires underneath the strap that make it impossible for the gypsies to cut", assured Mum at the time.

I tried to tell Mum that this wasn't Malanda in the 1970s anymore and it wasn't necessarily politically correct to call foreigners gypsies. She didn't have a bar of it then, and she wasn't having a bar of it now.

"Gypsies! Thieves!"  The Japanese man was taking up Mum's theme.

I pointed to the CCTV camera that was filming us. "Perhaps they caught it," I said hopefully, fully realising that this kind of sting was probably performed on a daily, if not hourly, basis by those very same people. "Maybe the man at the information desk saw it?"

The man at the information desk was no Inspector Javert. He shrugged his shoulders as if to say, c'est la vie, and went back to reading his paper. Eventually the Japanese man drifted off into the Gare du Nord crowd, his plans completely stuffed by the clockwork precision of a handful of gypsies.

I was fuming as I rode on the Paris Metro towards our destination. I scanned the faces of the weary people on the filthy carriage, trying to read their faces. Are you a thief too? Are you eyeing off my bag? No way you're touching my camera.

Eventually we stumbled into the lobby of our hotel - located on an amazingly small sidestreet, the presumed natural habitat of gypsies - and into the safety of our room.

As an introduction to a city, it was a spectacularly bad one; I hated Paris at that moment. Fortunately that feeling would be completely reversed over the next four days.