Every part of this trip was as perfect as can be. The trip started out great with pink toilet paper in the airport bathroom in France. The first day we arrived we went and ditched our backpacks at the hostel then went and grabbed some lunch and tasty French pastries. We wandered around town and made our way to city center. The first thing we saw in Paris was actually my absolute favorite thing I have ever seen, even better than Giant’s Causeway which was amazing! Anyways, the first thing we saw was Sainte-Chapelle. It is a high gothic church. It was basically a stain glass building, no walls or anything, just all huge, tall, gorgeous windows. I could travel through Europe and just see the churches and be perfectly content. There is something about the size and beauty of them that just is so amazing. We sat in Sainte-Chapelle forever, it was just like looking at a big movie screen, it was almost unreal. We also went to the Conciergerie next door which is a Palace of Justice and an old prison. Marie-Antoinette’s prison cell was in there, it was pretty interesting. Then we went on a free walking tour in the afternoon. It was great. We got to see all the big attractions and figured out what we wanted to go back to. We walked by Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Napoleon’s tomb, the Latin Quarter which was beautiful!!, some gardens and lots of parks, the Opera Garnier (Phantom of the Opera, there really are rivers and water tunnels and such), les Invalides, Champs-Elysees, The Grand and Petit Palaces, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, the Musee D’Orsay, and about a billion other things it seemed like. The free walking tour was great and it’s really cool. It called a new Europe tour and they do 3-4 hour walking tours in all of the capital cities in Europe for free. But after the tour we wandered the city at night and headed home and talked to some of the most interesting people in our hostel. I met a girl who is from Japan who's been all over Europe, east and west, northern Africa and parts of South America; and in January she's going to travel all over Africa for 8 months!! And she's only 24! Basically she's probably the coolest person I met. I want to do that- Africa for 8 months, that'd be brilliant! Now i have a list of what seems like a billion places I want to go see. We also met some great people from Australia, South Africa, Switzerland, and Canada. Hostels are great! On Saturday we went back to visit some of the places we saw the day before. First we went to the Centre Pompidou. It was the most interesting building, kind of ugly, but really unique and colorful. Then we went to Notre Dame Cathedral which was breathtaking. I had to pinch myself inside to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. It was beautiful! Then we wandered around the Latin Quarter and visited the Pantheon and the park of palace of Luxumbourg. That night the same company that hosts the free tours also sponsors a pub crawl so we went to a Paris pub crawl. It was loads of fun and we met tons of cool people. On Sunday Michelle and I and one of our new friends from Australia, Byron, hopped on the metro and went to this really neat and giant cemetery. We saw the graves of a variety of interesting people: Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Jim Morrison- the guy from the Doors, and a ton of others. Then we headed to the Eiffel Tower. We went at the perfect time. We went in the early afternoon so when we got up it was dusk so it was still light enough to see everything but then waited for like 30 minutes and it got dark and the whole city was lit up. It was stunning! I really liked the Eiffel Tower. On Monday we went to Versailles and walked around the town, gardens and palace. It was great. I’m definitely have to go back in the summer though, because it was cold all the fountains were off and just drained and rusty. It was still incredibly pretty but I can imagine it would be a thousand times better with all the water. On Tuesday we went up to the Montmartre District. It was a lot different than the city center. We walked up this huge, but cute, little street to the Sacred Heart Cathedral. The church was beautiful as was the view of the whole city of Paris. Then we walked down the street to the Moulin Rouge. We finished our trip to Paris off with a visit to the Musee D’Orsay. It was really good, I saw a lot of things I remembered from Art History class and it was really cool. We never made it into the Louvre which was kind of a bummer. We tried twice but didn’t have luck cause it was closed both times for weird reasons, but that’s ok, I’ll be back some day :) In Paris we ate lots and lots of crepes covered in all sorts of sweets. My favorite would be nutella or cinnamon sugar. Another one of my favorite treats in Paris was a Croque Monsier. Basically it’s just a fancy grilled cheese sandwich but so yummy!
Paris streets
On the Seine
St. Micheal's Fountain
The Conciergerie
Centre Pompidou
Outside Sainte-Chapelle
Where to next?.... Bruxelles
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