PARIS!

Hello all! I'm a bit (hah) delayed in writing about this, but I finally found a bit of time to document my trip to PARIS 2 weeks ago. One of my friends, Maggie, is really good about organizing/planning things, and she worked out a weekend trip to Paris that was relatively inexpensive- so of course a bunch of us decided to tag along. :) There ended up being 8 of us in all. I've never traveled with an independent group that size before, and it was definitely an interesting experience.

We left Friday evening of last week and took an overnight bus that lasted about 7 hours I think. It was the kind of thing you can really only do when you're in you're 20's/in a foreign country, hahah. It wasn't too painful, though, I ended up sleeping the entire way once we actually got into the Chunnel. We were pretty beat when we got there, but Maggie had our itinerary all planned out for the day and we jumped right in- because it was so early and we couldn't get into our hostel, we took the metro to L'Arc de Triomphe and tried to find some breakfast. Depressingly enough the only thing that was open was McDonalds, so my first meal in Paris was an Egg McMuffin. Delish. The morning was gorgeous, though, we got to watch the sun rise over the Arc and take lots of awesome pictures:

After dropping our stuff off at our hostel (the Friends Hostel in Montmartre- the hostel itself was pretty nice considering how inexpensive it was, but the neighborhood was a wee bit sketchy- it was fine, though, because we were always in a group) we went right to Notre Dame. I'd been there before with the family, but I think last time we were there it was under construction- I got to see the full rose window this time. :) It was GORGEOUS both inside and out, as you would expect:





Even cooler was that there was a children's choir rehearsing in the cathedral for a concert that night! We got to sit and listen to them for a while- that was really cool.

We had our first crepes for lunch that day in a really cool cafe- afterwards, we decided we wanted to head over to the Eiffel Tower and opted to walk, even though it was quite a ways, cause it was SO nice out (we had really fantastic weather the entire trip, we never saw a single cloud and it hovered around the low 50s during the daytime). It was such a beautiful walk, we walked along the Seine and kind of weaved our way from one side of the river to the other depending on what looked cool. I took an obscene number of photos on that walk, but it was gorgeous and worth it.

We stopped for pastries on the way, but FINALLY made it to the Eiffel Tower around I think 4 or 5. We were completely exhausted at that point and pretty much just sat around taking pictures and resting, deciding what to do next.

We decided around 6 it was dinner time, and we went to a nearby bakery (sorry, boulangerie) and bought some baguettes, then a supermarket (supermarche) and picked up some cheese, nutella, and wine. Then we brought it all back (via metro) to the Seine, just outside of the Louvre and ate our picnic dinner on the riverbank as the sun was setting. Probably the best dinner idea ever.

Completely exhausted but not ready to give up yet, we trucked it over to the Louvre- Saturdays it's free for "young people"! I was dead tired, but I still managed to enjoy most of the exhibits. I saw all the classic pieces that everyone pretty much has to (Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, Venus de Milo....) but I was kind of disappointed cause the wing with all the impressionist era painting was closed off for some reason. Boo. After the Louvre (it closed at 9) we were pretty much dead. But it was kind of an amazing day. I still can't believe we covered l'Arc de Triomphe and Champs d'Elysees, Notre Dame, walk along the Seine, eclaires, Eiffel Tower, baguette cheese and wine picnic on the Seine, and the Louvre museum all in one day. It just goes to show what you can accomplish if you get up early (in our case... 5 am).

DAY 2!
We tried to get an early start but we were a bit beat. Still, we ended up in the town surrounding Sacre Coeur (just one metro stop from our hostel!) by around 11. Already starving, we looked around for somewhere to eat- this was probably our crabbiest moment of the trip. Everyone was tired, hungry, sick of walking, and tired of keeping up with an entire horde of 8 people- but after we found some relatively inexpensive delicious baguette sandwiches we all felt a lot better. We at our lunch on the steps of the Sacre Coeur- if you haven't seen pictures or been, the view is AMAZING.


We got to see the inside as well, but we couldn't take pictures.

When we'd had our fill of Sacre Coeur we split into two smaller groups. One group went to do some more historic sight seeing- I can't remember what they saw, but it didn't sound like anything earth shattering. I went with the group who decided to wander around the city and do some shopping. Fortunately it was really nice out, cause we didn't really find anything too interesting- we ended up at a huge underground shopping center with people EVERYWHERE and it was really hectic and kind of nerve-wracking. We were pretty happy to get away from there. :-P I did have a pretty awesome experience on the tube getting back, though. It was so crowded we pretty much had to push our way on and ended up bowling over this poor middle-aged guy, who was surprisingly nice about it ("Ce n'est pas grave, ce n'est pas grave!") He started talking to Katie and me- Katie speaks NO french, though, except for one phrase which she was pretty proud of using on him: "Je ne comprends pas le francais!" To which he responded "Pourquoi?" Hahah poor Katie. I came to her rescue and told him that we were Americans- his NEXT question was "Are you for Obama or Hillary?" Somehow I managed to get out (in french!!) that I was for Obama, and that Katie was for Hillary, but that they were both great candidates. Aside from how un-gramatically correct I'm sure my French was, that was one of my prouder moments of the trip.

That night we'd allocated to go out to a "real" dinner- real by our standards is anywhere where you sit down at a table and they serve you food :-P We went to a cute restaurant and had some pretty good food- my friend Chris even ordered escargot (he's a fan, apparently).

We split up again that night, and my group (my roommates and I) wandered around Montmartre for a while- we found a really cute candy stand and my friends stocked up hahah. We ended up in a pub which was okay but they wouldn't let us order pitchers of beer to share and made us order individual glasses, meaning we were charged a couple pounds more- grrr. So if I had to pick a "worst" day in Paris, Saturday would have been it just cause the overall stress level was high and things didn't work out quite the way we'd planned. But for a worst day it was pretty good :)

SUNDAY was awesome.

Most of the group spent Sunday at Versailles, but Janine, Chris and I had all been there before and decided to spend the day exploring parts of Paris that were new to us. We found a really cool market in a guidebook and decided to go check it out. It ended up being really fun- probably most of all for me and Janine, we found some really cute tops for relatively cheap. :) There were lots of other cook knick-knacks to look at, lots of produce. Probably my favorite part though was the street music- I heard some music playing and dragged the other two over to go see it. It was a brass band (+ a drummer) made up of pretty hip-looking young people (guys and girls) and they sounded really good! Probably the cutest part of the trip were the two little girls dancing along to the music:

That was really fun.

After the market Janine decided she wanted to do some exploring on her own, so Chris and I took off together to a church he wanted to see- Eglise de la Madeleine. It was very large, and very beautiful. We didn't really have an agenda after that, and we saw a really big cool-looking building in the distance, so we went and checked that out (didn't really find out what it was) and then... just kind of wandered. We generally aiming to find a. cheap food and b. a free bathroom, both of which were ridiculously hard to come by on a Sunday in the part of town we were in. After wandering around streets and kind of following whatever looked cool, we somehow ended up on the Champs d'Elysees and found lunch for about 4 euros and a free public bathroom and ate lunch on a bench overlooking le Grand Palais. It was pretty ideal. Then it was time to head back to the hostel (we'd agreed to meet people there at 4ish) and we headed in the direction of the Louvre cause we knew where the metro stop there was- but got KIND OF sidetracked by La Place de la Concordes, which was BEAUTIFUL. I don't remember being there before, and I took a ridiculous amount of pictures. Most were either of statues with birds on their heads (which varied in amusement depending on the expression of the statue) and little french kids playing with sailboats in the ponds (which i just thought was adorable). Here's some examples:

No one was at the hostel when we got there, so we took ANOTHER random wandering trip in the neighborhood surrounding our hotel, vaguely looking for a boulangerie. The neighborhood was kind of sketch. We saw a really cute (*sarcasm*) shouting match between a French man and woman and lots of knock-off vendors and weird-looking meat shops. We wandered around for what felt like a really long time, but somehow we found a really cute, inexpensive typical French boulangerie in the middle of all of the ethnic supermarkets. I got a brioche and chris got a baguette and this cool-looking loaf I can't remember the name of. We snacked on bread and took a nap (at least I did) until the rest of the guys got back.

That night we did the Eiffel Tower! I'd been to the second level with the family back in '99, but I'd never been to the top before- it was fantastic. Also freezing cold. But very much worth the 11 euros (the only money I spend on entertainment the entire trip!). One of the more amusing parts of that visit was the hordes of vendors trying to sell us blinking mini-eiffels which they called "bling-bling." To which we responded "pas de bling-bling, s'il vous plait."





I won't go into too much detail about our last night in Paris, other than that it involved a broken wine bottle on the floor of my friends' room and noise complaints/cut off power in my room. Oof. We all went to bed early.

Not much to say about the journey back, except for our adventures with the French customs: Chris (a very slim, shy, accommodating boy who's a really great travel partner just cause he's so chill) had a bit of trouble while the rest of us sat around on the bus and waited for him to get back. He was the last one in line, and when we didn't see him emerge right away, we decided to wait on the bus. We were joking about what could possibly be taking him so long, when we saw him being escorted into a separate building (Katie swears she saw blinds being drawn). This began to worry us a bit, but we weren't actually concerned until a passenger who had just gotten into the bus up front was overheard telling his seat mate that "they still don't know what kind of drugs he has." At this point we were rather concerned.
Poor Chris was detained for what had to be an hour, apparently because the French customs officers thought the container of antibiotics he was carrying were steroids. The scenes that followed, in my head at least, resemble a ridiculous sitcom: (chris speaks hardly any French, and the officers spoke only broken English) "These to make big? Make you big?" *flexing* "WHAT? NO they're antibiotics! For when I'm sick! I take them when... je suis sick!" Apparently they ground up one of the pills on his passport, cracking jokes about American and how strong American passports are. I think my favorite bit is the fact that they searched through ALL of his luggage, and eventually came across his bus reading- "I Am America (And So Can You!)" by Steven Colbert. I'm not sure they got the irony.

And thus ended my epic voyage to France. :) The left-sided traffic was strangely comforting when I got back. Sorry for the excessively long post, but Paris deserved it- shorter, more boring updates will be next I promise!