Ah Paris

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We have arrived in Paris! After looking for many hours for a place to stay on our last night in Sevilla, we settled on a Best Western hotel that ended up being less than half the price that the hostels we were finding were asking for! Sasha is still ill to a degree, mostly just coughing a lot, but she's managed through the past few days. After transferring from Paris Beauvis to the city centre (an hour+ coach ride), we ended up wandering around for almost another hour just trying to find the street we needed. We finally decided to just hail a cab, where the driver then proceeded to tell us that our hotel wasn't that far. Well, by that time, we were hot, sweaty, hungry, and tired and just wanting to get there so we told him we didn't want to get lost again and that we would just take the cab. It ended up being a 3.50 cab ride, but they charge another 1.50 for each bag we learned, so that sucked.

Finally arriving at the hotel, we check in and are told the elevator doesn't work and that our room is on the 5th floor. This also wasn't very fun, but hey we got some more leg work in and we worked off our breakfasts every morning climbing from the main floor back up to the room afterwards. This hotel was high class compared to what we were used to. We were so excited to see towels! And nice fluffy, soft, clean beds! And a flatscreen TV that we could watch the Olympics on! LUXURY!

Having gotten to the hotel fairly late by then, we ended up heading out to go meet up with a couple of Sasha's friends who were in town. We met Anna and Ange under the Eiffel Tower just as it was lighting up and flashing all of the lights at 10pm. So beautiful! After visiting the Tower, we made our way back to the hotel and enjoyed watching some of the Olympic action.

The next day, we decided to go back to the Eiffel Tower during the day, as well as check out the area around it. We walked quite a ways down along the river and enjoyed seeing all of the mega old buildings and oohing and ahhing at their construction. We then met up with Ange, Anna and their friends Frank and Antwan at a nice resturaunt and enjoyed learning about each other's culture.

We attempted to go to the Louvre but unfortunately on the Sunday that was free entry, the line was 2 1/2hrs long, which would have given us only an hour to look around until it closed 😞 Sadly, we decided to skip it but we did walk around and see Notre Dame, Hotel de Ville, and other mega impressive sights instead! In the square outside of the Hotel de Ville, they had a giant screen and an area with massive fluffy pillows where you could go and watch the Olympics for free. We caught a bit of tennis, but by that time we thought we should head back to the hotel.

During our stay in Paris, we did have to switch hotels; we ended up at a place on the complete opposite end of the rail line we were using, and it was surrounded by kebab shops and -gasp- McDonald's. We woke up to the smell of salty meat and fried foods which was not that nice. Though we did enjoy some delicious Chinese takeaway which was a nice change 😊

We loved being able to watch some TV and we were lucky one night there was a CSI marathon going on in ENGLISH! Loved it.

The following day, we also went to Disneyland Paris! I was really excited to go here, but sadly I didn't think it was that impressive compared to the one back in California. They had some similar rides, but they seemed shorter and not as fun. Though I have to say I did enjoy the Rock in Rollercoaster as well as the Hollywood Tower at the Disney Studios and Space Mountain back at Disneyland. Also Peter Pan was great! I remember going on that ride with Grandpa quite a bit when I was younger and absolutely loving it! Pretty short, but I still love the feeling of flying over the city.

---will add more later, am forgetting some stuff--

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