A couple weeks ago morgan, myself, steve, larissa and aleisha set off early on saturday morning to catch the eurostar to paris for aleisha's 21st celebration!! After working out where to go on the metro (fortunately we'd had lots of practise with the London tube so it wasn't a real drama), we set of for the hostel in Montmartre. Such a lovely area!! AND it had the best pastry shop just on the corner which provided us great treats for breakfast everyday...all we had to do was master "deux croissant s'il vous plaît".
After finding the hostel, we set out for a walk up the hill to the Sacré-Coeur which was pretty awesome. It's the coolest looking white building right up on the top of the hill overlooking Paris, and from there we headed on down the hill through what I thought were some fairly ordinary and smelly places (reminded me of bangkok) so I was not too impressed. However, then we arrived at the Louvre and surrounding areas which were incredibly impressive!! After resting our feet for a bit (was quite a walk from the Sacré-Coeur to here) we set off walking down the dusty path through the gardens (where I got a dust-thong-tan) and halfway up the Champs Elysees. I really enjoyed that part.
Then onwards to the Eiffel Tower where some guy tried the Gold Ring scam on us, but steve kept saying "no no no" and shaking his head with a smirk on his face, and the guy got really quite angry, yelling french into steve's face and then walking off only to turn around, stare at steve, and then spit at him. HA! what an idiot. You could see everyone he tried it on getting really angry too. Eventually we reached the Eiffel Tower and decided to wait in line for about an hour before getting to go up. I'm glad we did it, cos it was a cool experience. You go up a lift (there were stairs..as if) to the first and second levels at this really weird angle which kinda freaked me out a bit. Then it's a bit annoying cos you have to wait again on the second level before catching a lift right up to the top for some awesome views of everything. I never realised though, that the Eiffel Tower wasn't right in the centre of the city near the Louvre etc which was a bit strange.
Following a short nap in the park, we walked around the southern side of the river in search of some food... I've heard that French food is amazing... we obviously didn't find it. We did try snails though (even aleisha did!) and we all quite liked them funnily enough. We finished off the day with more walking around the Hotel L'Invalides and then catching a tube back to the hostel.
Sunday morning we visited the Louvre = AWESOME! The building it's set in is massive. I really enjoyed looking at everything - only thing is that you'd think being a big tourist attraction they'd have written everything in English as well as French, but only in some rooms did they have cards with English on them, so we couldn't really comprehend what significance most of the things had which was a tad disappointing. But we saw the mandatory things - Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and Napolean's state apartments were so awesome - almost better than Windsor Castle state apartments except that Windsor Castle's are actually used today.
After the Louvre we walked around the 2 islands and visited Notre Dame. I was overjoyed to see that we'd arrived just in time for the free pipe organ recital held every Sunday afternoon, until morgan pointed out that his watch was still set to London time, so in actual fact we'd just missed it by an hour :( But, just as we were about to leave, a sung eucharist started with 2 really good singers with the pipe organ - the guy's voice was SO good... we stayed for a bit ;) Then we wandered over to the other island, had some ice-cream from one of the shops with many flavours where there's a line down the street, and found some dinner. Not much better than the night before, but the people were really quite nice :) Morgan and I then walked home as morgan was sick, whilst steve, riss and leish climbed the Notre Dame and then went and visited all the sites that were lit up at night.
Monday we walked around Montmartre, found the Moulin Rouge, then morgan and I went and climbed the Arc de Triumphe. That was really cool looking from the top as you can see all the roads leading off from the Arc de Triumphe outwards. Then we enjoyed a pleasant walk down the Champs-Élysées and visted the Musée de L’Orangerie where we got to see 8 of Monet's waterlillies where they had 2 rooms, with 4 in each spanning the walls. Needless to say they were massive - and unlike everywhere else, we were actually allowed to take photos of them, so check out our photos.
Some lunch in the Jardins de Tuileries (I had a cold crepe.. not so good) and then back to the islands where we visited the Sainte Chappelle. This is an amazing old chapel with huge stained glass windows that have all the stories from the Bible on them, so we spent about half an hour just gazing around. Of interest, the chapel used to allegedly house the Crown of Thorns, some pieces of the True Cross and a few drops of Christ's blood.
To finish off our time in Paris, we then walked around the Luxembourg Gardens and found a nearby chocolate shop (supposedly the best..hmm), then walked through the Latin Quarter before heading home.
All in all, I don't think I'd go back to Paris anytime soon, but I would like to have a stopover there one night just so I could see it all lit up at night - that would be nice :)
some photos HERE
