The day hadn’t got off to a great start. I was flying back to France from the UK after a friend’s funeral. I’d been living in Paris doing a French-language course and living with a host family who, to be honest, weren’t particularly welcoming.
It was late at night when I got back to the apartment, only to find the entrance code to the building had changed – something the host family had neglected to mention. They must have already been in bed, because nobody was answering my calls. Short of throwing rocks at the fourth-floor window to wake them up, I had no way of getting inside.
I was stuck wandering around Paris with my suitcase, wondering what to do now. I rang my girlfriend back in the UK to ask if she might be able to book me a hotel online – this was before smartphones. She had a look, but everywhere was €350 a night or more, which was crazy money for a young student and absolutely out of my budget.
At this point I was feeling stuck, hopeless – and quite hungry. I wandered over to a McDonald’s and the staff there clearly realised something was not going well for me, so they offered me a couple of burgers for free as they were closing up.
I wandered over to sit on a bench and eat my Big Macs when a guy came over to me and started speaking in broken French. He clearly wasn’t a local, so I switched to English and, sure enough, he was a Brit just like me. He asked me for directions to the McDonald’s and I told him it was just down the road, but that he was out of luck as they had just closed for the night.
He started walking away but I yelled out that they’d given me more food than I could eat, if he would like one of my burgers?
He accepted my offer and sat down on the park bench to eat with me. We got chatting and I told him my story about not being able to get into my apartment, while he told me he was an executive at a big bank, here on a work-funded trip. He said: “Don’t take this as a weird offer or anything, but I can see you’re in a tight spot – do you want to sleep on my hotel room floor?”
I was a little hesitant and initially declined. But chewing over the fact that I had nowhere else to go, I called my girlfriend for advice. She had a conversation with this man over the phone and we decided the safer course of action was to take up the offer, rather than spend the night on the street. He slept in the bed, and I slept on the floor of his five-star hotel, which was actually quite comfortable.
That man rescued me from unfortunate circumstances and I came away reminded that people can be good to each other. All he gained from that offer was the knowledge that he’d helped someone else. And a free burger, I suppose – but he was going to get that anyway.
What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?
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