Okay so I am finally posting this blog about Paris – especially for my mother because she likes to email me every 30 seconds asking about my blog update. HERE YOU GO, LOVE!
First, I would like to say that Paris was more than what I expected it to be. Amazing, breath-taking… they don’t call it the city of love for no reason!!
Getting to Paris was a hassle. Me and my girl friends had been warned before that it takes about a good month prior to traveling to work out trains to get to paris because they fill up so quickly. About three weeks before we go to paris, we go to the train station in lugano (a 2 minute walk) and figure out arrangements. We were in the train station communicating (I would say “talking” but its hard to “talk” to someone who does not speak English well and my Italian is slightly rusty… go figure) with the person for about an hour until we finally we able to get a cheap, 3 changing train ride to paris!!
Paris is not cheap. Paris is expensive. (obviously… if its not cheap than it has to be expensive). Originally we were going to try and cram 19 people into an 8 person 1 bath apartment. Yeah… you think we are crazy but until you travel on a budget… you MAKE things work. Luckily, we were able to find another apartment near us so we ended up splitting up (thank god… 1 bath for 19 girls? HA!!! That would have been a fun 4 days to blog about…). The apartment I stayed in was very nice, quaint, and cute. 1 bunk bed, 2 futons, and 2 lofts. We fit 12 people into the 8 person rather comfortably. The only problem that we faced was the shower situation….
[[[[[[I have never actually experienced a “cold shower”. Ohhhh this was more of a FREEZING shower. After 4 nights of staying in this apartment, I was lucky to score 1 semi warm shower. The rest were freezing. ICE. Like, I couldn’t not breathe because I was that cold. I know I talk about having an unusually high temperature that always causes me to sweat profusely in any circumstances… well… this was a different situation. I did not enjoy this shower one bit. Anyway.. that is my ranting on the showers. Other than that, we had free coffee so that was nice, I guess.]]]]]
Okay, now that that venting session is done, I can now start to tell y’all about the best days ever in PARI!! We were very lucky to be traveling with one of the girls on the trip that actually is French and speaks fluent French!! So thankfully we had a native so we did not get too ripped off and taken advantage of because we are just “silly americans”.
SITES: The Louvre, Notre Dam, Eiffel Tower, Versailles, Moulin Rouge
LOUVRE (pronounced: loov)
The Louvre is a really cool, big, musueum filled with a lot of art. The main thing it is known for is, of course, the Mona Lisa. Now, I had heard that the Mona Lisa is one of the most disappointing pieces of art to see, and I had no idea why. Well, let me tell you why. After standing in line for 30 minutes, luckily getting a free ticket into the museum (its free after 6pm), making our journey all around the Louvre to find this masterpiece, we finally come up the a room filled with people. I suspected we found the Mona Lisa because of the people surrounding this wall. I was confused at why everyone was staring at just a wall… but then as I walked closer… I realized they were not just staring at a blank wall. You see, the Mona Lisa is the size of a sheet of loose leaf paper. It is the smallest, most DISAPPOINTING thing I have seen. Yes yes yes, I saw the Mona Lisa, but not gonna lie…. It looked the same as all the pictures and replicas on the internet…. And that’s all I have to say about that.
When we came out of the Louvre, we came across a rather frightening thing. We witnessed a black male chasing away and hitting at 2 young girls!! We were shocked at what we had just seen because they black man literally was swapping at these 2 girls as if they stole something from him??? We were sooo confused until we experienced something that made us realize why he was chasing and yelling at these young girls… On our walk from the Louvre, 3 girls (about 8-12 yrs old) came up to us with papers in their hands indicating that they were deaf and they wanted donations to this organization. We soon figured out that this was a very popular scam that is placed around Paris. Not only did we see these girls approach us at the moment, but we had children come up to us 3 other times with the same scam of being deaf and trying to distract us so that people could pick-pocket us!!! It shocks me how a human being could manipulate children that young to pretend that they have a disability in order to carry out this scam… disgusting.
Anyway, the next cool thing we saw was Notre Dam!!! All I could think about was the movie the Hunch Back of Notre Dam… obviously. Hahah Again.. another disappointing architectural site. Ive seen one church, ive seen them all. It was a very beautiful church: tall ceilings, nice art, cool stuff all around. Again, Notre Dam is just one of those places I went to just to say I went to it.
Onto…. THE EIFFEL TOWER!!! Not going to lie, once we got to the Eiffel Tower… it hit me so hard that we were actually in Paris! What a breathtaking thing to see in real life!! Absolutely amazing. You grow up learning about such a dramatic symbol of Paris… and actually being in the presence is completely gratifying. My favorite part of the entire trip to Paris, was drinking wine underneath of the Eiffel Tower for 2 hours in the park. So many people are in the park (both days we were there) – everyone just sitting and picnicking and listening to the performers… it was perfection.
Versailles was another spectacular place to go it. I do not know necessarily the purpose of this gigantic, beautiful palace… but it was gigantic and it was beautiful. I think Marie Antoinette lived there at some point??? Anyway, it was about a 45 min train right to Versailles and worth it!! Before you actually get to the palace, you have to walk about ¼ mile up what I like to call their “driveways” at the time. You could see the golden gates approaching –( I wanted to walk faster, but naturally… everyone in Europe thinks building rods made of cobblestone with huge spaces in between is the best thing to walk on and you definitely wont sprain your ankle…) We get to the gates and the palace is MASSIVE!! OH MY. This was something I’ve never imagined before but only really seen palaces like these in like.. Disney animated films or something. We could have paid 15 euros to go into the palace… butttttt I am broke and I had to save some money so I could eat escargot later. We skipped the tour of the palace, but we were able to go to the gardens in the backyard (look at the pictures on facebook, most beautiful acres of land in the entire world).
Moulin Rouge. Well.. there isn’t really any too significant about the Moulin Rouge other than the fact that we love the movie and we just wanted to see the real thing in person. Again, another disappointment from the French… its just a building with a cool miniature ferris wheel type object attached to it. Still, I love the fact that I can say I went to THE Moulin Rouge. “Voulez vuco shea avec moi, ses swa” hahahah…. Dirty.
That's all the main sites for now!! Soon to come: all the juicy cool stuff having to do with paris!!
- diversity
- they all hate americans
- starbucks incident
- sex shop on every corner
- men calling out rude gestures
- small bars - not a big clu scene
- crepes
- longchamp
- dinners outside
- escargot
the suspense must be killing you.. hehe.
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