My Time in Paris

---

My Dad woke me up really early in the morning and we got a taxi the short distance to St. Pancras station which is where the Eurostar train travels to Paris from. The Eurostar is a really fast train (about 300km/hr) When it gets to the south coast of England it goes into the tunnel under the sea called the English Channel. When it comes out the other end it is in France. Two hours after leaving London it arrives in Paris.

We arrived in Paris at the station called Gare du Nord. It was really hot when we got there. I could only understand about two percent of what was being said when I got there. There are all these trains in Paris called the Metro and the RER and we bought tickets for them and travelled to our hotel in Montparnasse which is in the South of Paris. When I got there I had lemonade and a croissant. Then we got the metro to the Centre.

We walked across the bridge to the Ile de Cite which is a little island on the River Seine which is where medieval Paris used to be. We saw Notre Dame Cathedral and we walked over to the next island, Ile de St Louis and we had lunch which was square pancakes called gallettes. I had a really good chocolate milk shake. After that we got the RER and went to see the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was big and the line ups were even bigger so we decided to go up it in the evening. On our way home my Dad thought he had left his wallet at the place we stopped for ice cream. He panicked and was about to run back and then I told him I thought he left it at the Hotel and I was right he had. He was very pleased.

We rested for a bit at the hotel. I tried to watch the Simpsons but it was in French and I didn’t understand it and I don’t even think Homer said D’oh. Then we had dinner at a restaurant where the owner could do magic tricks. He stabbed a pencil into a five Euro note and he took it out and there was no hole.

Then we went to the Eiffel Tower. There was a big line up and it took a long time to get to the top. They lit it up with flashing lights. By the time we got to the top it was dark. I hadn’t seen darkness for over two weeks as it gets dark in London really late. When we got to the bottom again it was really late about midnight and the metro had closed and all the taxis were full and we had to walk nearly all the way back to the hotel which I didn’t like at all.

The next day we had breakfast and we went to the Paris catacombs deep under the streets of Paris. A long time ago, they emptied all the cemeteries in Paris and stored all the bones deep in the tunnels of the catacombs and now there are the bones of about five million people down there. Lots of them are the victims of the Black Death. You walk through tunnels for miles which are stacked up with bones on either side of you. It is cold and dark and damp. When we came out we were a long way from where we went in. It started raining. We went and had lunch. Then we went to the park called the Jardin du Luxembourg. There was a giant head sculpture and we went to a playground that had a flying fox. I played on it and it was a lot of fun. Then we had to go to Gare du Nord to catch the Eurostar back to London. We nearly missed it because we were running late.

---

Comments

[Mr Brown]

Paris
Hi Liam. I think madame will be rather jealous of what you have seen. The video of the Eiffel tower was rather impressive. Your beret looks pretty cool. I think the guys in the catacombs look rather bony. Did the place smell at all? Mr B.