The Unexpected Happens: The 2-Hour Eurostar from London to Paris

The moment I was left speechless at the start of our journey

Actually, this trip to Paris and Berlin had all sorts of things happen right from the beginning.

If I rewind the tape... the trouble actually started the moment we left the house. The taxi we had booked didn't show up. I had left the taxi order to my darling. We waited and waited, and it was already nearly an hour past the time we had planned to leave the house. I called the office, but no one answered. What is this all about? Even though I said, "Let's just call a taxi with Uber," my darling insisted, "No, we'll wait."
"Okay, that's enough. Call a taxi with your Uber," my husband, my darling, finally said, losing his patience. I called an Uber, and it arrived in just 10 minutes.

Phew. Cold sweat. I swallowed the urge to make a sarcastic comment to my darling and decided to reset, considering it a "result-oriented" success that we made it to the Eurostar in time. It was a moment where I thought, "Ah, I've grown up, too." I'm glad I've been studying the miracle course...

However, however.

It didn't end there. Our couple's adventurous journey. I was looking forward to the high-speed train that goes under the sea, but... honestly, it wasn't a pleasant experience.

The problem was the handling of wheelchair users.

The couple in front of us were also using wheelchairs and had originally booked first class. But just before boarding, a Eurostar staff member told them, "Wheelchair users cannot purchase first-class tickets," and they were downgraded to a lower class.

And the seats they were moved to were, believe it or not, "our reserved seats."

In other words, my husband was supposed to move to a regular seat to ride, but that didn't happen, and he was told to move to the wheelchair space instead. However, there are no seats in that space. It's just a wheelchair securing area. My husband stayed in his own wheelchair for those two hours.

It's hard for those of us who aren't paralyzed from the waist down to imagine, but for someone whose muscles don't move, staying in a wheelchair for a long time on a vehicle is apparently an extremely painful state.

Moreover, when I explained the situation to a female customer service representative, this is what she said back to me:

"If you can move to a seat, then you don't have a disability, do you?"

I couldn't believe my ears. Huh? Rather than being angry, I was just stunned.

I figured that talking any further here would just make it an even worse memory, so I quietly backed down. But I was able to convey the situation to the higher-level customer service department at a later date. That was at least some consolation.

There were multiple wheelchair users in the same carriage, so maybe the staff on the ground were overwhelmed. But I still couldn't accept that the burden of that was passed on to the passengers. Would this kind of response happen in Japan? I couldn't help but compare.

I am currently writing a letter of complaint with the help of ChatGPT.

Well, next time I plan to write about the events after arriving in Berlin, but there is also a story about the train into Berlin that makes me think, "Not again..."