Our Brush With the Police

This afternoon, we had an adventure. We had arrived back after our long morning walk and were sitting relaxing in our apartment. I looked outside our terrace door, and saw that parking meter police walking up the street giving tickets. We had moved our car from the overnight parking lot to the on street parking in front of our apartment thinking (naively) that our car would be all right there for a short time. When we got outside, we discovered we already had a ticket on the car.

We "talked" to the parking lot police officer (he didn't speak any English) to ask him how we could pay for the ticket. He pointed to the address on the ticket - the police station. We then put the address in our trusty GPS and started walking. Once we found the police station and I had looked up the phrase for "We want to pay for this ticket," we stood in a line at the police station. When we got to the head of the line, we had an officer who did not speak any English. He shook his head indicating we did not pay the ticket there and kept saying something about smoking. Finally, another patron explained we needed to go to a tobacco shop and buy "a stamp" for the ticket, and then bring it back. Well, after 5 different stops (each one saying they didn't have the stamp) we were finally successful in buying our stamp at a tobacco store. (see Greg outside the Tobacco Shop with the stamp on our ticket!) We then walked back to the police station and turned in our ticket. The whole episode took about 3 hours.

We both commented how this experience gave us a lot of insight into what Steve and Jess must of felt like when they first arrived in France. It takes a lot of tenacity to try to communicate when you don't speak the language or understand the protocol of how things are done. We just chalked the whole experience up to part of our adventure - plus a lot of good walking on a beautiful day!