Advertisement
Published: January 19th 2010
Edit Blog Post
This weekend, Allison, Annie, Mackenzie, Denise, and I went to Paris. Since there were five of us traveling, we got a mini-group discount and roundtrip tickets were only 25 euros! However, we had to take the train that took 2 hours instead of one hour, but saving 50 euros (or $75) is definitely worth it!
Our train left Saturday at 9:04, so the plan was for Annie and Denise to meet me at my house at 8:15. However, at 8:20 I get a call from Annie saying that Denise wasn’t at their meeting spot and she wasn’t answering her phone either! So I went out and met Annie, and together we decided to ring Denise’s doorbell (even though the French sleep late Saturdays—my family wasn’t up when I left…) But Denise had the train tickets and we didn’t know where she was. Luckily Denise’s host mom was awake when we rung the doorbell—Annie and I awkwardly stammered out words in French and found out that Denise was still asleep! Her host brother woke her up and she took about two minutes to get ready, so all was well in the world again.
We arrived in Paris around 11:45 and
P1010176
Denise, me, and Mackenzie quickly found the metro lines that would take us close to our hostel…key word being close. We only had the road address and no directions how to get there, so we just picked a random metro stop in Montmartre and figured that we could find the road once we got there. Getting off metro was miserable. First off, we passed by this weird turn off/room thing that people seemed to be flocking towards, which we later found out was an elevator. We found this out after climbing approximately 3,259,873 steps with our overnight stuff to once again reach the surface of the earth. Where it was raining. A typical Portland, constant rain. We decided our first order of business would be to find a restaurant where we could be dry and have some lunch. Mackenzie and I split a cheese platter (yum) except there was also a piece of butter on it, which I took a huge bite out of. We decided that they disguised the butter as cheese on purpose because we were American. They also put an extra drink on the bill, and when we pointed this out to the waitress she tried to act like it was
the bartender’s fault. Not going back there. As we were leaving they yelled after us that we should come back that night for live music…didn’t happen.
We then wound up in the rain once again, and after consulting a map, it was kind of complicated how to get to our hostel (called Perfect Hostel). When presented with a tough situation like this, we used our brains like any Americans would, and used Allison’s blackberry to dictate walking directions to us. Which worked marvelously. 20 minutes later, cold, and wet, we arrived at the Perfect Hostel. I’ve never been in a hostel before, but apparently this was not a “cool” hostel—it was pretty much like a cheap hotel. However, Allison and I did have a private bathroom, which was nice. We huddled around the heater and decided to do some shopping because we though we had seen some interesting shops on our walk to the hostel.
Sadly, we were mistaken. There were only a handful of shops we actually found and they were all ridiculously overpriced (or perhaps just expensive—there was one store where the owner had hand-sewn all the clothes). So, disappointed, we went back to our hostel
to once again dry off, and chatted there until the rain mostly let up about an hour or so later, and then we went to dinner on the Champs-Elysées.
After the two second walk to the metro station (so there was a closer one…) and a 4 minute metro ride, we ascended from the underground system to find ourselves face to face with the magnificent Arc de Triomphe, and no rain. We took advantage of the fresh air and lack of precipitation to meander down the Champs-Elysées to scope out all the restaurants. We ended up coming back to the first one we had seen, an Italian place. (There are a TON of Italian restaurants in France—but I guess that’s the same in America too—and we convinced ourselves that any restaurant would have a French flair, which was true.) We splurged on a semi-nice dinner—I had pasta with salmon which was absolutely delicious. We also split desserts across the table and ended up staying until 11. or 23h as they say here. Partially because we were having fun and partially because we could see it had started raining buckets, once again. We were hopeful the rain would stop, but
eventually we left anyway and walked in the rain (only sprinkling now) to the Place de la Concorde where there was a giant Ferris Wheel that we went on (minus Allison who is terrified of heights, and I must say, it was pretty high up there—Mackenzie was the only one completely relaxed the entire time, pretending to open the doors of our little gondola which almost cause Denise and I to have heart attacks.) The view was beautiful from the Ferris wheel. We could see the Eiffel Tower in all its glory as well as all the magnificent Parisian architecture—that being said, the view would have been improved if it wasn’t raining. We were there right at midnight, so the Eiffel Tower started sparkling (which it does every hour on the hour) which was beautiful. We then walked to the nearest metro station (except Annie, who limped because she had worn heels—poor girl) and returned to the Perfect Hostel for some much needed sleep after a busy day and an exhausting week.
We got up Sunday at 10 to do more touristy things in Paris—except this time we had to carry our overnight stuff with us, which wasn’t very
fun (my shoulders are still sore from my backpack—gahhhhh). Back to the Champs-Elysées for breakfast, climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, walked to the Eiffel Tower (the line was way too long and the top story wasn’t open), ate lunch in a tourist trap restaurant, went to the louvre and saw the outside (we decided we didn’t have enough time to justify paying the entrance fee), and had Nutella crêpes and coffee in a café.
Even though we had thought we had left ourselves plenty of time, we found ourselves running through metro stations to make our way back to the gare (train station) on time. But luckily we made it with 15 minutes to spare! We got home a little after 7:30, just in time to have dinner with our families.
All in all a fabulous weekend!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.049s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 15; qc: 27; dbt: 0.0237s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Mom
non-member comment
Soggy visit to Paris
Sounds like Paris is having as much rain as we are at home! Your photos are terrific! It looks like the new camera must be working well. Thanks for including all those pictures. And. . . Nutella crepes? YUM!