J'adore Paris!

I just got back yesterday from a week in the city of lights, Paris! I had a wonderful time exploring the beautiful city with Lana, Diep, Brendan, and James. And the food---Paris was a dream for a foodie like me. Crepes, pain au chocolat, baguettes, croissants, Camembert and brie...I miss it already. We also got some good deals at restaurants; we ordered from the set menu and ate three course meals for only 10 or 15 Euros! I even tried duck l'orange and beef bourguignon. Oh, and now I'm addicted to Nutella. ;)

Our itinerary:

Day 1-Stayed overnight in London and saw Covent Garden and Hyde Park, which we missed last time around. Covent Garden was a delight, and I'm going to have to get back there sometime to shop. And, being major geeks, I also had to see Platform 9 and 3/4 at Kings Cross. Needless to say, I didn't manage to make it through the wall. Then we went to the British Museum and saw cool manuscripts, including the Magna Carta. We lost track of time, raced to St. Pancras Station and barely made our departure time on the Eurostar. Literally we collapsed into our seats and the train took off within minutes! I have to say that the Eurostar is the fastest train I have ever been on. So fast, in fact, that it caused my ears to pop constantly! But we made it into Paris at the Gare du Nord and found our hotel, Hotel Cheap Beds, in the suburbs of Paris. I promise that the hotel was decent and very nice, not at all as sketchy as the name makes it sound! Names in Paris are like that: I passed by shops that were named "Shoe Store" and "Japanese Restaurant." They mean what they say, and this was a hotel with cheap beds. ;) The strange part was that the area we were in looked just like any American suburb, complete with a huge shopping mall and McDonalds. The only difference was that all the signs were in French and McDonalds sold Royales with Cheese instead of Quarter Pounders! And though it was disorienting at first, it was nice to see cars driving on the right side of the road for once!

Day 2-Took the RER train into the city and saw Notre Dame, the most beautiful church and cathedral I have ever seen! It was even bigger and more breathtaking than St. Patrick's in New York. Best of all, we climbed up to the Tower and had some awesome aerial views of the city. We also saw the Emmanuel Bell, which got "The Bells of Notre Dame" from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame stuck in my head. And the gargoyles were pretty awesome too. We ate dinner in my favorite area of the city, the Latin Quarter. It's a great little area near the universities, so it was perfect for cheap students like us. There were cute little shops (I bought a Parisian scarf) and lots of cafes, restaurants, patisseries, boulangeries, brasseries, creperies and street vendors selling delicious food. I am proud to say that our group became "regulars" at this one crepe/waffle stand. I liked the Latin Quarter much better than the more famous, but more commercialized, Champs-Elysees. Later that night, we got even better views of Paris from the one and only Tour Eiffel! The lights of the city were beautiful; my favorite view was looking down at the River Seine and watching all of the lit up tour boats go by. The night was cold and windy, and by the time we got to the top of the Tower it started to snow! I feared for my life going up and down the elevators to get to the top...but it was magical.


Day 3-Spent practically the whole day in the Louvre, which is NOT enough time. Seriously, the place was massive. I could not have imagined a museum that big. With three long wings, each with three floors, it was impossible to see everything, but we tried. Of course we saw the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo, which were predictably amazing, but there was so much else there too. The Egyptian section was great, and it was so much easier to view the mummies there than in the British Museum, where it was cramped for space. That wasn't an issue in the Louvre, where the building itself was a work of art! One of the most surprising things about the Louvre was finding out that its medieval foundations still exist on the lower levels. Or, as I put it when I found out, "There's a castle in the basement of the Louvre?!" It was so cool going down there. The other surprise was that we entered the museum through the glass pyramid! I mean, who knew that it actually had a use? As much as I feel that attractions in Paris are overpriced (and the lunch at the Louvre was most definitely overpriced, 7 Euros for a salad is extortion) the museum itself was worth every penny of the 9 Euros I paid for it.



Day 4-The chateau at Versailles. Or as it should be more appropriately called, the palace. I have never seen a more opulent place. It was beautiful, of course, but a bit excessive! Every room was grander than the last, and the Hall of Mirrors topped them all, as you can see by the picture. My next favorite room was the Queen's bedchamber. Unfortunately, it was too cold and rainy to see much of the gardens, but I could tell that they stretched for miles. Also somewhere on the grounds was a little fake cottage that Marie Antoinette built to get away from court life. She dressed up as a shepherdess and played with perfumed sheep there. No, I can't make this stuff up. Versailles also had amazing artwork, like the Louvre, but to me the real masterpieces were the ceilings. Many of the rooms were dedicated to Roman gods and goddesses and scenes from mythology were painted on every ceiling.



Day 5-Our last day in Paris. We said goodbye to the Latin Quarter one last time and headed off to see the Catacombes. It was a shock going from the splendor of Versailles to the quarries underneath the city, filled with thousands of skeletons. By the early 1800's, the graveyards of Paris were becoming overcrowded and unhygienic, so they exhumed the bones and piled them atop one another underground. I had seen pictures before, but it was so creepy to actually be down there. In the afternoon we went to see Montmartre, the Artist's District. Parts of Montmartre are seedy (the Red Light District is nearby) but the part we saw was quaint, un-touristy, and quintessentially Paris. We also climbed up to the top of the hill to see the Sacre Coeur Basilica, which was beautiful. There was a random concert taking place on the church steps and a living statue performing, and it was just the perfect way to spend our last night in Paris.

All in all, I fell in love with Paris, even if I didn't get to practice my French as much as I wanted to. Although I could read a lot of the signs, they spoke so fast that it was hard to understand them, and much easier just to switch to English, which almost everybody knew anyway. Ordering food was easy, though, and I loved getting to say "Bon Soir!" every night. Despite the less than stellar reputation of Parisians, we found almost everyone to be friendly and helpful. I only had one bad experience, with a woman at the train station who was a total . We had two tickets to get to and from Versailles, and when Lana and I accidentally put the wrong ticket in the machine, she wouldn't let us through until we paid for another fare, even though we had paid the full price the first time! Then when we gave her money to cover both of us, she cheated us and only gave us one ticket, forcing us to buy yet another! The people at the Tube in London would have just let us through. I guess you just have to be careful with the Paris Metro; that wasn't the only issue we had with it. We also had issues with hecklers. As we'd walk down the streets, people would aggressively come up to us trying to get us to buy cheap junk, and men would wait outside restaurants yelling at us to come in. As if abusing us would make us want to eat at their place! And it was sad for such a beautiful city, but there were lots of beggars in Paris. We saw them at every major tourist attraction we went to, and people would hear us talking and come up to us asking if we spoke English. American tourists are prime targets for pickpockets in Paris too.

But despite that, most of the people we met in Paris were nice, from funny and friendly waiters and cashiers wanting to know where in America we were from to a man who helped us out at a metro station when one of our tickets didn't work (as usual). And I think they really appreciated that we at least tried to speak their language and didn't butcher it too much. ;)

A bientot, Paris!