She Went to Paris

All right, so right now I am obviously backlogged. When I booked all these hostels with free internet, it didn't dawn on me how absolutely crowded and overbooked the computers would be. Even when we got up at the crack of dawn this morning for our train, there was an epic line for the computer. Anyway, now we're in Brussels and we're all backlogged. The last two days have been pretty tiring, so I'm just going to do individual entries.

So, on Thursday (was it Thursday?), we woke up at the crack of dawn to get to Heathrow for our early flight. Actually, it was a 10:45 flight, but we had to leave early because there's usually epic traffic between Reading and Heathrow. There wasn't. Instead, we sat down at this place called the Giraffe Cafe or something in the Terminal and ate breakfast. It was pretty cool. They had really good smoothies made from ingredients from all over the world and played a lot of world music. Their drink mixers were also little giraffes. We stole a bunch because we're sick like that.

Anyway, for some reason the one hour flight to Paris seemed to take FOREVER. I don't know why, but whatever. We got into the airport, got our bags, walked across the airport to the little train station, had to pull out our Eurail pass information to get tickets, and stand in line to get tickets into the city as well as try to sort out the fact that Gianni and Oppa managed to wash his Eurail card in the laundry. That took forever as well. We got in at 1-ish and didn't leave for Paris until 2.

Next stop, the main Paris train station. Here, we rambled around until we found the train ticket counter and then stood in this line of epic proportions to get train tickets for most of the trip. Seriously, you would have thought we were in Disneyland or something. Anyway, we get to the front of this line and like five hundred (two) people cut in front of us. Well, they were legitimate reasons, but still. We get to the ticket counter and this women is an evil, evil rude woman. She yells at us for checking about Gianni's Eurail pass, yells at me whenever I ask a simple question and was overall unpleasant to deal with. Fortunately though we have the majority of our trains and 2/3 overnight trains booked at this point. I would have done more, but after she yelled at me when I politely asked why I couldn't book the train out of Budapest (I was curious more than anything else), I was fed up with her and decided to book it in a more people-friendly environment.

So, once that was done, we get Metro tickets before realizing that they have all day metro passes in Paris as well, and head to the hostel. It was around 5 when we got to the hostel and we were pretty sure that we weren't going to get anything done there at that time. We were all pretty tired from the whole travel experience and slightly jetlagged (Gianni's still having problems), we decided to just hang around and explore the Left Bank because that's the area of Paris that Mia really wanted to do. Instead, we managed this epic walking tour of Paris.

We started our journey by walking to the Rue Mouffetard, which is a big street market deal. They had a lot of shops and stuff, but I think what made Mia most happy was the first (of many) French comic book store that we saw. We wandered around aimlessly for a while after that, passing by the Pantheon, the University of Paris and what I think may have been the Latin Quarter (but we were very disoriented).

Our next destination was the Notre Dame Cathedral. We ended up getting distracted by a lot of stores and shops and sights on the way there. Also got dinner because Andrew was whining (also because it would have been the first time we were eating since our breakfast at the Giraffe place). We ate at this creperie. Gianni and Andrew both got panini. Mia and I split one and split a crepe. It was so good.

After that, we walked to Notre Dame and took a lot of pictures of it. We were going to walk along the Champs Elysees after that, but it started raining kind of hard, so we had to run to the nearest Metro and figure out a new plan. Gianni at some point mentioned that he wanted to go see the Moulin Rouge for his friend, so we detoured all the way out there for that, took a couple of pictures, and then hopped back into the Metro. Andrew had already been bitter about the Platform 9 3/4 incident and he wasn't much happier about this one.

Next stop, was the Arc de Triomphe. We were going to walk from there to the Eiffel Tower, but Gianni Andrew and Mia were all about to die. So, instead, we walked down the Champs Elysees in search of a CD store for Mia, which we actually found right as we were going to give up on that quest.

By the time we finished that, the Eiffel Tower was on the way on the Metro back to the hostel, so I convinced Gianni and Andrew to go there. It was like 11:30 by this time, by the way and it had just gotten dark. That threw us off.

Anyway, we stopped by the Eiffel Tower and took night pictures of the Tower. Mia got a picture with a random French guy, because that's been her project this trip. Taking pictures with random people everywhere.

Anyway, we got back to the train around midnight and back to the hostel at almost one. The line for the internet was crazy crowded, but I think my crazy insane brother might have stayed up for it. I showered, cleaned up my stuff, figured out some of the plans for the next day and went to bed at 2. Long, long day. It seems shorter in this post I guess, but we walked almost everywhere. Anyway, I'm going to see if I can get the Brussels post in since I have 35 more minutes of internet time.