European Getaway Day 1 - London to Paris

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Day 1 - London to Paris

So the big day has arrived, the first day of my mega European tour. I wake up at 5:15 at the Travelodge next to the hostel where my Topdeck tour departs. Grab a quick shower and head to the hostel to meet the people I will be spending the next days with trekking around Europe. I must admit to being slightly nervous. I always find meeting new people awkward and today I am likely to meet about 40-50 new people.

I register with our tour leader Jess and speak briefly to a few people hanging around. We all jump on the shuttle bus to Dover. On the bus I speak with a few people and begin to get to know people, my first observation is that pretty much everyone is Australian. Although the girls I am sat with are Mexican, everyone else I have spoken to is from Oz, which is cool.

We board the ferry and make the short journey across the channel. I hang around with Sam, a girl from Sydney, Andrea from Melbourne, Simon and Lauren, a couple from Newcastle (in Australia) and Brendan, who is from Perth (who lives in Melbourne). We get off the ferry at Calais and board our main coach and meet our driver, Phil. Phil’s an Irish bloke, seems pretty sound and has already remembered half the people’s names already, and he has a fascination with white horses, which we have to shout up if we see one as we are driving. I also find out that I’m the only Brit on tour, which is slightly scary but will be nice to meet people from other countries.

We stop briefly at a French service station where I treat myself to a baguette and then continue to Paris. We arrive at the hotel in the early evening. It seems fairly basic and in a rough area of the city but all is well. I room with Brendan and Trent (another guy from Perth).

We head out for dinner at a local restaurant and have onion soup followed by beef on some sort of pasta. We also get to try l’escargot and frogs legs. I give the snails a miss but try the frog’s legs. They taste a bit like chicken.

Next up is our driving tour of Paris. The difficulty of which is the French traffic, people in Paris cannot drive to save their life, they cut people up and don’t care about the safety of anyone, it’s mad! I’m sat with Trent on the coach and he comes out with a classic quote, which will certainly make quote’s of the tour. Seeing a building which has the flags of various countries on he says ‘look, it’s the flags of Britain, USA, France, Australia and Miscellaneous (Miscellaneous being the flag of the European Union). Classic. We see all the major sights, Museum D’orsay, the Louvre, Moulin Rouge, the place de la Concorde, the champs elysees (is a busy street), arc de triomphe and the Eiffel tower, where we stop for pics and gain our first experience of the shady cheap tatt salesmen, who are also pickpockets. We also see the opera house famous for the Phantom of the Opera; this is an amazing building which I may visit tomorrow. We head back to the hotel and straight to bed.

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Photos

L'escargot
Snails, which I avoided