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I left for Paris on Sunday afternoon. I went from Oxford to London and then took the Eurostar to Paris. The train was really nice and quick! It took 2 hours and 20mins to get there. I think we were under the English Channel for about 30 minutes. You didn’t even notice that you were under. I then walked from the train station down a main street. There are so many streets feeding into one circle that I could tell which one was the main street. Good thing I didn’t get lost. My hotel was along the same street as the Moulin Rouge. The along the street on the way there was a lot of sex shops and peep show type places. As I was walking along I got really freaked out to where I was staying, like my god. I got to my hotel okay and by that time I was really tired, so after dinner I went to bed. The hotel wasn’t the greatest but it turned out all right. The breakfast was pretty good, 6inch French roll, a croissant, juice, coffee and yogurt. Then for my first outing I decided to go to the Basilique du Sacre Coeur
that was in the area I was staying. It was gorgeous; it was actually one of my favourite places. It has these amazing stairs in the front and it is on a hill and you can see almost the whole city. Then I took the metro to the Concord, which is right in the middle of Paris. I could see the Eiffel Tower in the distance and decided to walk there. It was pretty far. But the gardens and streets are full of cute shops and street side venders, so the walk was interesting. Every place you went was packed with tourists. I didn’t have a hard time at all finding people to take my picture. I stayed around the Eiffel tower for the afternoon. The park behind it was so pretty; I stopped and ate a crepe while watching all the people and enjoying the view. Then it was to the Invailids, where I met this girl from the US. She was waiting for her tour to start in the evening so we walked around together for the afternoon. It was nice to have some company for the afternoon and dinner. Then before it got dark, as I didn’t
The view
From the step of the Basilique du Sacré-Cur want to walk around at night alone, I went back to my hotel. I thought I would watch some TV, but all I got that was in English was the BBC world news that was repeated over and over every hour. I caught up on my world news every night before I went to bed! The next day I did some shopping and walked down to the Norte Dame Cathedral. Then at 6:30 I did a night tour on a segway. It was actually a lot of fun. It was an American run tour and I was with an American family. They were quite boring and didn’t pay much attention to direction, but entertaining. It doesn’t get dark until 10pm so I was getting disappointed that I wasn’t going to see anything lit up, but that changed when the daughter fell of the Segway and broke it. We had to hang out at a café until someone came to get the machine and bring a bike. This took about 45min-hour and by that time everything was lit up, I got to see the Eiffel tower twinkle with lights, it was so nice to watch. This only happens for the first
10 min of every hour. I then saw a couple of other places all lit up and then the tour was over. Just as we got back it started really pouring down with rain and I had to walk to get a cab, this wasn’t easy and by the time I got in I was soaking wet! Then I had a gorgeous cab ride back to my hotel, past the Moulin Rouge, which was amazing.
The next day I went back to the Eiffel tower and went up. First you have to pack into the elevator and it is really slow. The second level was so pretty and you can see everything. It was good that I saw everything first so I knew what I was looking down at. Then I took the elevator to the top level. I actually liked the second level better because you can see everything so clearly. It was really windy and when you walk outside it is all encaged and smaller then I thought it would be. After a while I went back down to the second level and stayed there for a bit longer. I then found a good place to eat that
had a good variety of food, reasonably prices and close to my hotel. I had a good ¼ chicken and fruit, because my body needed something else other then bread and cheese.
Then for my last full day in Paris I took the metro to the Louvre. You can see all of the pyramid stuff, including the inverted pyramid without actually going into the museum. I walked around for around 4 hours. It was so beautiful and so much to see. I had printed off a guide to seeing the masterpieces in The Louvre so I knew what I wanted to see the most. It was even tourist season yet and it was packed with people. It was so loud walking around I was surprised. I had to wade through a pack of people just to see the Mona Lisa. It took about 20min, and then people are pushing at you so you cant look at it for very long, kind of took the enjoyment out of looking at it. I then walked about and took my time through the other exhibits. After some lunch and sitting outside along the fountains around the pyramids I thought I would walk towards
the Arc du Triomphe along the Champs Elysees. I walked all the way to the end and it took almost an hour and a half. I walked into all the expensive stores like Louis Vuton, etc. It was pretty cool but I didn’t buy anything. I am a terrible shopper I could find anything, clothes wise, that I wanted to get. It then started to rain, again, so I headed back to my hotel. In the morning of my last day in Paris, I went back to the good shopping strip. I walked around a bit and took my time heading back to the train station. Getting around actually turned out to be pretty good and easy. All in all it was a really amazing, liberating, life experience that I will never forget trip. I can’t believe that I made it through and everything turned out all right, I didn’t get hurt, lost or anything stolen, and I actually enjoyed the time to myself. I am not sure if I would ever do anything quite like it again. I think if I ever did want to do a trip alone again I would plan it with a tour. I did
meet some very interesting people in lines and people that sat next to me in café’s. Not everyone was overly friendly but most of the other tourists were interested in talking to other people and finding out where they were from, etc. To see my pictures from Paris you will have to go to my facebook page.
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