For those of you who enjoy my longer blog posts, I hate to disappoint you this time. I can tell already that this is going to be a significantly shorter blog than usual, even for someone like me who loves to talk (... or write in this case).
Paris Paris Paris... I had such high expectations for you and you didn't seem to quite meet them. Sleeping at the airport again probably wasn't the best of starts, but even that wasn't too bad... Once I fell asleep. We landed in Paris around 9:30am, but we didn't actually get to our hotel until around 12:30pm or later. Upon getting off the plane, we got directions pretty easily, but we didn't realize that those directions would leave us so far from our hotel. Instead, they left us about 1 1/2 walk (what with not knowing where we were going) from our hotel. That was fun. So we wandered around a rather sketchy neighborhood looking for it for a long time. We even stopped to ask some police officers we found, but even they couldn't really help us. We walked a lot. Finally, we stumbled upon and and immediately checked in and then fell asleep. Yeah... the first thing we did in Paris was take a nap. That about set the tone for the rest of the trip.
Eventually we woke up and went to go explore a little bit. We learned that in order to get into the heart of Paris, we had to take a 20 minute bus ride (on the 159) to the bus/metro station and then another 20-30 minute Metro ride to any of the stops in that area. Friday night we wandered over to the Louvre. It was pretty cool, but I don't think Kami and I had that same "Oh my gosh, we are in Paris" feeling like we got while in London. But it's the Louvre we and we got in for free since we are students in the EU right now, so it was still worth it. We were in the Louvre for awhile and got to see Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. That was pretty cool. Otherwise (to me) it was just another museum.
After the Louvre we grabbed coffee and some food (we ended up eating at McDonald's... How very American of us). After that, Elle connected (on my phone) with some of her sorority sisters who were in Paris also and went to go hang out with them. The three of us headed to the Metro, but went separate ways, Elle to hang out with her friends and Kami and I back to the hotel. When Kami and I got back, we each took showers (which felt SOOOO good by the way) and then accidentally fell asleep watching TV while relaxing. Around 10:30pm we woke up and realized that we hadn't actually eaten dinner. We went down to the restaurant in the lobby of our hotel, but apparently they close early... So we were told to go check the restaurant at the hotel next to us just in case the closed at 11:00pm. We ran over there, but lo and behold, they were closed too. The receptionist at that hotel was nice enough to tell us that there was a McDonald's about 15 minutes from there. He gave us general directions and off we went. Little did we know that he must have been mistaken because we definitely never found it. We walked at least 15 minutes (if not longer) in both directions and never found one. We did, however, manage to find a little convenience store where we bought some junk food and called it dinner. At least we weren't hungry? The cool part of that, though, was that we were speaking Spanish the majority of the walk so we wouldn't come off as the two American girls, and in the store, the cashier's friend asked us if we spoke English and the cashier said, "No... Spanish!" We passed as Spaniards to French people! :) I call that an accomplishment!
On the way back to our hotel, we were wondering if Elle had made it back yet. As of when we left she hadn't and it had been over 30 minutes (which is about as long as it should have taken). We were preparing to be worried if she wasn't there, but thank goodness she was. I expected her to be angry that we weren't there when she got back, but she was just curious as to where we had gone. She laughed when we explained our situation... We talked for a few minutes and then we all crashed.
Saturday was an interesting day. Kami and I forgot to set an alarm, so we were woken up at 11:30am by the cleaning lady. Elle had left a little bit before 10:00am to go meet with her friends again. She told me as she left to text her friend when we wanted to meet up. Kami and I took our time getting ready... which was much needed after our hectic Friday. We finally got out of the room around 12:30pm-1:00pm. We texted Elle and told her that we were grabbing lunch near Notre Dame and then going to go poke around there and she said she was already there. So we just figured we'd meet up later. Kami and I took the bus to the Metro station and then were trying to figure out how to get to Notre Dame. There was a Notre Dame stop, but in Paris in order to transfer to another line, you must buy another ticket. We didn't want to do that, so we got off at the stop where we would have transferred and made our way to the street.
We got to street level looked around and had that, "Where the hell are we?" moment. It was actually kind of funny. We ended up finding this hole-in-the-wall bagel place that was amazing (or maybe we were just starving?) and from there we guessed our way to Notre Dame. Notre Dame (from the outside) was amazing! Very big. Hahaha... We also found a little crepe place as we were heading to the back of Notre Dame and stopped to eat crepes. Nutella + banana = heaven (and a tummy ache... but totally worth it!). We were wandering around Notre Dame when we saw the top of the Eiffel Tower. We both looked at each other and immediately started heading that way.
We didn't realize it was going to take so long to walk there... By the time we got to the base of it, it was dark! Which I didn't mind because it was all lit up and pretty! :) We did find a little cart selling croissants, so of course had to stop and buy one. Mmmm... I love croissants. We also found a square full of grass, so we stopped and enjoyed seeing grass again. Neither of us realized that we miss grass. It was probably pretty funny to watch us running our hands over it.... Anyway, we ate our snack and kept moving towards the tower.
Being under the Eiffel Tower was my first "OMG I'm in Paris moment". Unfortunately, it came at the end of the trip... We took lots of pictures and considered going up, but neither of us wanted to pay. So we took our pictures and headed back to the hotel. Our journey back to the hotel was rather... long. We got on the right train going the wrong way... So it took us 2 hours to get back. I'm not complaining though because it definitely served as bonding time. We talked pretty much the whole way.
When we finally made it back to our Metro stop, I was in dire need of a bathroom stop. We made our way to street level and miraculously came across a McDonald's. Free bathroom and cheap food? Yes please! We stopped and ate dinner there, something that turned out not to be such a good idea for my poor tummy that night. :(
We got back to the hotel around 10:00pm and relaxed. As we were getting ready for bed, Elle came back. She wanted to talk and stuff because we never actually managed to meet up with her during the day, but we were so exhausted from all of our walking that we just kind of fell asleep. We also knew that in order to get to the airport on time Sunday morning, we needed to be picked up by a taxi/shuttle thing at 4:45am. We needed our sleep.
I was so happy to finally make it back to Spain. I was happy after my other trips, but this was different. Almost like coming home after Barcelona. I got about just as much sleep... My "grandparents" picked me up from the bus station and we headed back to their house where everyone was. I fell asleep until lunch and then fell asleep again after lunch. I can see why my sleeping is becoming an inside joke! We left earlier than usual from their house and made our way back "home" where I proceeded to fall asleep... Again. At 12:00am, my "mom" woke me up and we all went to sleep.
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