Going to Gare de l’Est

We retired quite early as we needed to leave early the next day, it will be another busy day so it was good to get some rest. We will be going out of Paris this time and this we will be taking the train. The railway station is actually near where we were staying. The Gare de l’Est metro station was just two stations down the Barbès–Rochechouart metro station on Line 4 of the metro line. I was glad that it was easy enough to get to. If you look at the subway map of Paris, it takes a while to trace something as it has a lot of connecting lines. However, not all of these lines are actually metro lines. The metro ticket works a little differently from the ones I have gotten used to. The ticket operates on the basis of zones. As long as you are within a certain zone then you get charged this much or that much if you move to a different zone. I think it somehow still based on distance but it is still quite different from the strictly distance based ticket that I was used to.

The Gare de l’Est metro station is a major station and it connects to three lines 4, 5 and 7. You do need to do a fair bit of walking to get from one line to another however, it is easy enough to figure out even if you can’t read French. The stations here quite old and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of maintenance here. Security is quite lax as I would see people just jumping through the turnstile. There are some tall contraption which block potential jumpers but really determined ones would push through no matter what. I don’t understand the need to do that since the ride doesn’t really cost that much. There are inspectors on the train though, so the just need to watch out for those.

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