A $250 lesson in Paris subway usage...

Cliff Notes Summary: You cannot exit the subway and reuse the same ticket in Paris, no matter how little time has passed, even if the turnstile lets you in, you may get fined heavily if you run into a ticket checking station.

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My wife and I were in Paris back in April.  I've been to Paris my fair share of times and had used the metro for most of my getting around.

Rather than buy day tickets we bought a pack of 10 single use tickets.

I always thought you had 90 minutes from the first time you use the ticket to transfer between the subway and the bus. But it turns out you do have 90 minutes from when you first use the ticket for the subway to transfer onto a bus but you can't exit the subway then enter the subway with the same ticket no matter how soon.

So we went to the Arc de Triomph via the subway/Metro.

Then since we were only there for maybe 45 minutes or so, we entered the subway again and tried using the same ticket.  The thing is those plastic shields opened for us.

Another thing is we saw at least 3 younger folks force their way through the plastic shields with brute force and we were shaking our heads at them but it would turn out that we were being just as guilty of breaking the law as they were.

Once we got off the subway, there were uniformed workers checking people's tickets, I didn't give it a second thought and handed our tickets over, then the lady worker said in English, "Oh no, we have a problem here."

We would find out you cannot exit and reenter the subway on the same ticket, however at the time this was happening, without this knowledge I thought they were scamming us and argued why would the turnstile/gate open for us when the ticket is not valid?  They honestly didn't care and said we'd have to pay the fine.  And since there were 2 of us, the fine ended up being around US$250.  Since we had a restaurant reservation at a fancy place I had been looking forward to as the highlight of the whole trip, I figured, just pay it then dispute it with Chase later.  Then later I saw that they were not scamming us.  I still thought about disputing it but I could not in good conscience do so knowing I broke the rules.

That ended up being 1 expensive subway ride!

About the restaurant we were headed to, it was Pavillon Ledoyen; http://www.yannick-alleno.com/en/ so I can probably figure out which subway station we were fined at, it was possibly this station: https://goo.gl/maps/4PummxWswps

Champs-Élysées - Clemenceau station

Now that I think about it, it doesn't really make sense to have that kind of a checkpoint in a "nice" part of town.  Yes, the people who go there might be more able to pay.  Maybe it's a French way of taxing the rich.  Not that we're rich obviously.

The restaurant was a slight disappointment, the food was good but not very memorable or remarkable and certainly not worth a special trip just to try it.  That was the restaurant that put me off going to Michelin restaurants for good.