La Vallee Village

I saw one of the attractions on the local tour book is a visit to a factory outlet, and they charge $19 Euro busing you to the site. I checked with the front desk manager to see if it’s far away from where we are. She told me that it’s very easy to get there by taking Metro and a connecting train. After she gave me the direction and connecting train information, I decided that we were going to explore it ourselves.

So, after reviewing the map and transportation info again, we took off. Metro is easy and by now we have no problem with that. Got off Metro, and walked through Metro tunnel and we got to the train station. Surprisingly, with our Metro $1.60 ticket, we got into our connecting train station and popped on the train that we were looking for. The whole journey took slightly over an hour to get to our destination. And I was like, man, it’s so cheap to ride for an hour Metro and train for $1.60, of course, with victorious smiles on our faces.

I felt so good that I couldn’t wait to get out and explore more. When we got to the exit door, here came the problem; we couldn’t get out of the station. We thought it might be the machine failure, so we tried another one, but still, we got stuck in the station. Now, it’s a real problem, because we CAN’T communicate with anyone. We looked at each other for a few seconds, and saw 2 people got out of a handicapped exit. We ran fast but by the time we got to it, it closed again. Can you see how embarrassed and clueless we were at that moment? Thank God, we saw a red button (I guess it is for emergency use), so we just had to press it for rescue. And we were released and told that we should have got the ticket of $5.70.

Just as we got out the station and had no idea which direction we should go, we saw the “free shuttle to La Vallee Village.” Everything was cool again. Popped on the shuttle and we got to the outlet. There are a lot of brandname stores, like D&G, Burberry, Lancel, Longchamp, Ferragamo, Polo (of course) and others. I had to say that it’s not as impressive as the outlets we have in the US. The selections of goods are quite limited. But I had to say that it’s a great day of exploration, with gorgeous weather!