Bonjour ma famille et amies! Comme ça va? Je suis très très bien, pour j'ai vu Paris!
Okay, so my French could use une petit peu of work. Or une grand peu. Still, out of the group of people I went with (all American/Australian), my French was the best (impossiblé) so it fell to me to navigate us around Paris during our spectacular (and sometimes terrifying) adventures there. I thought people in the Montreal Tim Hortons spoke very little english (I am speaking tomato!) but communication there was often far more challenging. Despite this little barrier, I think I can say that last week in Paris was my favourite week of this trip so far. I think Paris might be the most beautiful city in the world (though of course I've a few more cities to see before I can accurately make that claim!). So, just because I want to remember every spectacular detail, what follows is going to be a verrryyy long post, probably done in parts! Don't feel obligated to read it all, I'm sure all be more than willing to give you the highlights when I get home!
Day -1:
Because our flight left so very early in the morning, Rhiana, Alyssa and I made our way to Dublin the night before. Katherine, Julia, Emily and Martin would be joining us a few days later for the weekend. I am quite a veteran when it comes to overnighting in airports, but this one was a little less comfortable than most, with very few cushioned areas, and nearly no where without bright lights and music. Thankfully, my friends are resourceful, and we ended up spending most of the night in a very comfy playground. I say most of the night, because we got kicked out by security at 3 am. Because naturally there is a line up of kids waiting to play on a playground at 3 am.
Day 1: We are in Paris! We nearly run off the plane at Beauvais airport quite literally jumping with joy! We pause for a moment to let the reality of the situation sink in, and then another reality hits. Now what? While most of our days in Paris had a pretty tight agenda, we really hadn't planned for this first one. We were vaguely aware that this airport was a couple hours out of the city and our hotel, conveniently located near Disneyland, was not conveniently located near us at all. So after some aimless wandering and fruitless attempts at eliciting help in French (Excuse moi? Où sommes-nous?) we finally found a machine that gave us a ticket to Paris! Where in Paris? Who knows! Who cares!
Eventually, we decide to make our way to the Arc de Triophme (Où est les meteró? Où est le Arc?). I don't think we could've made a better choice for our first stop in Paris. About a bazillion steps up to the top of the Arc (which is a bazillion times bigger than I imagined) you can see pretty much the entire city! It completely took my breath away, and once again I was wholly overwhelmed with the idea that I, me, Sarah, was actually, literally, physically, and truly in the one and only Paris.
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| Doesn't this look just like an old fashioned Paris postcard? |
Coming down from the Arc we realize that we are starving. Luckily, the streets all around us are full of cute little french cafes.
Our first attempt at ordering a meal in French was not exactly a success. We were trying to order Rhiana a burger and fries:
Luckily, whatever this was, it was delicious!
After lunch, we decide we had better start making our way to our hotel. Turns out, Disneyland (and subsequently the place we were staying for the first two nights) was way out in the middle of actual no where. The train takes forever, but gets us pretty close, but then you have to catch a bus, which come every two hours and stop running at 8pm. A little inconvenient. Anyway, we finally make it back, and have a couple seconds to collapse, exhausted.
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A real hotel! Not a hostel! Private bathroom with little shampoos, what luxury is this?
But, we cannot stay horizontal for long! It's our first night in Paris! I had previously made plans to meet Blake and Ian, two of my friends from StFX who are also doing European exchanges in a Canadian pub in the Latin quarter, so with a couple moments to freshen up from our night in the playground, we are off again! We know we will not be back until well after 8, so we get the number of a taxi from the people at the hotel, who can pick us up from the train station.
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Downloading my GPS- Alyssa's sense of direction is actually insane, I don't want to think how many times we'd have gotten lost without her!
An hour or so later we are in the city again, but finding the Canadian pub proved more difficult than we'd originally thought. Asking "où est le pub du Canadian?" did not elicit much help from the locals. We were standing at a street map ready to give up, when I heard familiar voices behind me. Entirely randomly, we had bumped into my friends on the streets of Paris! It was such a nice surprise! We proceeded to grab some delicious kabobs for dinner, then wandered around some of the gorgeous Paris night time sites.
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| Notre Dame |
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| The L'ouvre |
After Ian and his friend from school left to go meet up with our other friend Paul in Lille, we wandered with Blake around the Montmatre area. This is officially my favourite spot in all of Paris, and if I was ever going to live here, it would be in this area. We stopped and had a glass of wine in a cafe, and then a little before one in the morning Rhiana and Alyssa and I began to make our way back to our hotel in the middle of nowhere. An hour and a bit train ride puts us at just past two when we arrive at the station and called the number of the taxi given to us by the hotel manager. We get an answering machine. What I could tell from the rapid French, was that the taxi service was closed. C'est une problem. There is a man who works at the train station who, after shutting down the station behind us, as ours was the last train, is rushing to his car. We stop him and try to explain our problem, asking if he knows the number to a taxi, but he was clearly in a rush to get home and brushes us off, speeding away. We find a little old sign with a cab number on it, which I call, and ask the man who answers to send a cab. He asked me what time we'd like the cab for, and of course I say right now. He nearly laughs and says he'll have no cabs available until six the following morning. I ask if he knows any other cab numbers, to which he replies that his are the only two cabs in the area. At this point we are more than a little worried, and I explain to him that we are students traveling and we are stranded at a train station in the middle of the night all by ourselves, and we need help. Not knowing what else to do, we ask for the number for the police. He must of misunderstood, and thought we were trying to call the police on him because he abruptly hung up. Très désagréable! Finally after taking a moment to think, we realize that my handy dandy little iPhone box has internet capabilities. We do some research and finally come across the phone number for our hotel, and we call and explain our situation, and they finally find us a taxi. So ends the very very long, first day in Paris!
Day 2:
DISNEYLANDDDDDDDD DISNEYLAND DISNEYLAND DISNEYLAND!!!!!!!!! DISNEYLAND IN PARIS! DISNEYLAND IN FRENCH! EN FRANCAIS! YIPPEEEEE!
ahahaha I don't know if there's anything else to say about this. I was in freaking disneyland in Paris.
It was a perfect day. A little drizzly, but warm. Parisian Disneyland is remarkably like Los Angeles Disneyland, except that everything is in French, which is crazy and cool. Also there was no jungle cruise, but I recovered from that blow. Basically it was all very very magic. We went on every single ride, and space mountain twice. We saw eeyore and mickey and pluto and the princesses. The night time show was potentially even better than the LA one. It was all just perfect.
So that's the first two days! Days 3-6 to follow! Love you and miss you all lots!
