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Published: August 4th 2005
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Mont Martare
The long stretch of Rue Lamark in Paris Hey all
Its been a few days since our first blog and what a few days it has been! so much has happened we dont know where to start
one of the reasons why we didn't writte earlier was because the hostel computers had french layout keyboards which means that touch typing is useless and it actually makes it more frustrating because you go from 70 words/min to spending up to 2min sometimes to figure out where a damn character is! it makes writing anything longer then 2 sentencase so frustrating you'd feel like smashing your head on the keyboard.
Anyways we have left Paris and have arrived a few hours ago in Nice, south of france (oh and this hostel has standard keyboards!). Because we had a limited time in Paris we tried to pack in as much site seeing and other actvities as possible during our stay and guys we can say one thing about Paris.....AMAZING. the sights, the sounds, the people , streets, the city life, it just honestly just blew us both away. i think we will definetely be coming back to this great city if we have the chance. when you walk around paris
Arc De Triumph
The huge arc in the middle of a 5 or 6 lane roundabout you can just feel the history, art and beauty of this city. a good arabic word to describe it is "3aree8a" but i dont know what the english translation would be so if anybody does please let us know!
it is just too much to write about in this blog so we've chosen to comment about a few things we saw/did.
one of the first things we did is go to the Arc De Triumph which is an arc created by napolean to glorify his victory. that structure is in itself amazing but one of the cool things is that it lies in the middle of a huge roundabout which is about five lines wide but has no marking. you will have to be crazy to want to drive through it because there are no give way signs and no sort of traffic control! there are about 5-6 roads connecting to it and the amazing this is that cars just drive straight into the roundabout without slowing down and the next thing you see is like 10 cars that are already in the roundabout stopping dead in the tracks right in this middle of the roundabout to avoid hitthing
Bridge
Ahhh the artwork... this guy. then you have another car that wants to drive into the road the other guy is driving in and you get this mess of cars all over the place and all trying to get somewhere. it is very entertaing to watch and we both just sat there looking at how they drive and wonder how drivers in Auckland would handle something like this! one thing we noticed though is that it was an orderly kind of chaos, what seemed like an underground set of rules that you have to follow to avoid having a car crash.
We then went to do some window shopping down streets with major brands like Hugo Boss etc. there you have like jeans for 850 euros and shoes for 450 euros and up...even window shopping would make u go broke.
We met a few intersting people in our hostel (and street), including a group of swedish guys and a couple of american girls from california who shared the dromitory with us. We met the calfornians the night before our last day and they wanted to go to the same places as us so we made tracks together for our last day
Lourve Pyramid
This huge glass pyramid is the entrance to the huge Lourve museum. There's a saying that it would take 9 months to see everything inside this musuem, so you can imagine how much of it we saw in 4 hours! The Mona Lisa was surrounded by hundreds of people who wouldn't leave 'her' alone! take her photo and leave her alone!! in Paris. we later found out that the brother of one of the girls is in iraq and had two months to go before leaving...they knew we were origonally from there and we talked a bit about politics. her brother hates being there and wanted to leave months before but they kept him but he is going back home for good in two months.
We set off to the top of the Eiffel tower which gave us an amazing panoramic view of the very impressively oraganised blocks of Paris. We missed the hordes of people queueing up for the top and we enjoyed watching them during lunch in the Eifflel tower park.
Morbid this may sound, but we set off to the Paris-famous Catacombes! An underground mine that was turned into a mass graveyard. In 18-something there was a plague which wiped thousands of Parisians and with no enough graveyard space, the Mayor ordered the excavation of Paris' old graveyards where the bones of tens of thousands of buried people were taken and 'neatly stacked' inside the 1.5km stretch of mine walkway walls!!! It was unreal to see so many bones stacked all along the walls.
We
Eiffel Tower
Big aint it? left the Catacombes to the Paris Plage party on the Siene river to chill before our Train to Nice. The girls came along to book their train for the following day. We left ourselves 'plenty of time' before our train departure time which was 10.20 pm. Walking towards the train station at 9.45pm we took out our booked tickets for a quick look only to find our train was at 9.17pm!!!! it was unclear as to which one us was to blame, but it didn't stop us from yelling out
FAAA#@!#
. the girls loooking astonished said
...you know that is the FIRST time we hear you guys say f#@!# !!
... we nearly cracked a smile then but yea... we were too pissed off. The problem was that it was the last over-night train which we paid hansomly for along with our booked Hostel in Nice and no accomodation for the eveing in Paris!! Ahmed set off to negotiate our options to the booking office and with a stroke of luck, we got our booking transferred over to the following early morning train and were allowed to sleep at the train station. So we were going to make it to Nice in the afternoon instead of early morning. We were dehydrated, tired, and
The Catacombs
A bit morbid to be in a place like this! needed a toilet so with no water around, small change, and a locked up bathroom we gave up and attempted to sleep on the hard floor and rough it out. We woke up at random times often by this guy's snoring (he slept on the floor too!) and our sore bodies telling us to go to a bed! so we got a back-aching 2 hours of sleep and headed off like at 5am to the train station looking a bit too rough to believe we were 1st class passengers! We had a bit more drama that night but i'll give my fingers some rest.
We made it to sunny Nice and decided to have a relaxed 1st night here to recover.
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