Paris! (Part 2 of more than I thought)

This is part two of what looks like will be a 3 part series on my trip to Rome. If you didn't read part 1 yet, click on the link below!

Link to Part 1

So to recap, I figured out the metro, and got to the metro stop near our hostel/hotel we would be staying at. I turned down the street to be greeted by Becky and her entourage standing outside the hostel. Becky’s entourage, let me introduce them. All of them are interior design majors at Syracuse University, studying abroad in London with Becky. They are: Maggie, Erin, Stacey, Becca, and Lindsay. And what an awesome group of girls to travel with.
So I quickly dropped my bags at the hotel and we were on our way to sightseeing.
I keep changing back between hostel and hotel when talking about where we were staying, so let me try and explain that now.

MIJE Fourcy:



We stayed in a hotel/hostel this weekend for Paris. It was called the Hotel Fourcy, yet was described as a hostel online and other sites. So lets try and figure out which it is, shall we? It was an older building in pretty much center city Paris, which was a great location. The rooms had private bathrooms, point for hotel. The toilettes though were not in the private bathroom, but in the hallway, point hostel. We did not pay for sheets, point hotel. We were given breakfast, point hostel (In Europe in general, breakfast is served at hostels and not in hotels). There were lots of young students there, point hostel. There were also lots of older people there, where normally hostels have only under 35 allowed, so point hotel. Late checkout, point hotel. I think that puts it in favor of Hotel, which is a good thing. It was priced more like a lower hotel than a hostel as well.

Notre Dame:



Our first tourist attraction, Notre Dame. I knew the cathedral was big, but I didn’t know what else to expect. It was a pretty impressive sight. The church is really impressive from the outside and even more impressive from the inside. Maybe I’m just spoiled though, but I didn’t get that same overwhelming feeling I got when going into St. Peter’s or St. Paul’s here. Maybe I’m just getting used to incredibly large churches. Nevertheless, it was an awesome church to see.

The Louvre:



If you want to talk about an overwhelming sensation, try walking into the Louvre. There’s a reason this was featured in that google superbowl ad (yep I saw it! Online of course). It’s obviously very well known for at least two things: its glass pyramid entranceway, and the Mona Lisa. Both are cool in their own regard, the first I found to be cooler than the latter, but I think the real spectacle is the sheer size of the building. We spent about 2 or 3 hours in the Louvre, and only got to see one wing of one floor of it completely through. That is probably about a tenth of the entire museum. Of course we saw the Mona Lisa, and I took my obligatory picture of it, but as most people are these days, I was underwhelmed by it. Maybe if they would let me get closer than 30 feet from it to really examine it, or took off that horrible glared glass case from around it I could appreciate it more, but I guess the experience is more about saying you saw it than anything. There were plenty of paintings that had more of an effect on me because I could get up close and see the detail and texture in the artists work.

Saint Chapelle:



Next on our list was Saint Chappelle, which is known to have some of the nicest and probably tallest stain glass windows. Bottom line is this had some awesome stain glass windows, but it was small and a bit underwhelming as well. They sell it really well in pictures, making out to be a gigantic hall filled with stain glass windows, when it’s really a relatively small place. Considering we got into the Louvre for free through some fast talking (European Union resident students get free entrance to all museums, we’re students but not EU residents, but we’re very convincing sometimes) I felt like the price of admission was a bit high for Saint Chapelle. Maybe it was because they are doing restorations on the windows, which means they have part of it covered up, which takes away from the experiences. The restorations are definitely helping though, the difference between the finished side and the unfinished side is like night and day. As much as I may complain, it really was a cool place to sit and look at the simple beauty of it all for a while.

Afterwards we got lunch, which was a sandwich in a French baguette with fries and a drink all for 5 euro. When I say French baguette, I mean an entire loaf basically. They don’t skimp on their sandwiches and bread, something I was happy to find in Paris.

(I feel like I’m forgetting a sight that we saw in-between here. To be honest, the weekend is a whirlwind of sightseeing, eating, walking, and having a good time. If I remember I’ll be sure to update. If anyone on the trip is reading this and remembers what I’m missing, please tell me? Okay thanks!)

Champs-Elysees & Arc de Triumph:



You might think we are nearing the end of our day but we were just getting started. Up the Champs-Elysees towards the Arc de Triumph. It was as much further walk than we originally anticipated. The arc looked so close! Yet it was so far away. We got there, and it was well worth the walk. This is one of those monuments you learn about every semester of French class you take, and it really is a cool monument, right in the center of it all, at the intersection of what seems to be all of the roads of Paris. We opted in to climb to the top, and the view from there was incredible. Right as we were about to go back down, the Eiffel tower lit up a golden orange. It was the first time we (or I at least) saw it lit up, and I couldn’t help but stand and stare for another 15 minutes at it and the streets surrounding us. Afterwards we walked around and found a local caffe to eat at. The French onion soup was awesome. I didn’t order it, but I stole some of Beckys and we both really enjoyed it.

River Tour:



We ended our night with a riverboat tour of Paris. The boat left at 9pm and took us on an hour ride up and down the Siene river. We got to see a lot of familiar sites from the river at night, and more that we didn’t know anything about. The highlight is definitely seeing the Eiffel tower from the river though. I can’t even tell you how many pictures I took of it from the river, always thinking that “now” I’ll have a better shot/it looks cooler from here, or maybe it’s just closer? It was a beautiful night, and was a perfect end to my first, yet very busy (jam-packed with fun?) day in Paris.

So it looks like this is going to be 3 parts. Wahoo! Tomorrow I’ll tackle our trip on Saturday and Sunday, along with some tangents I want to go off on for a while. See you then….

Also, Pictures are up from the trip. Not all (internet is crawling) but many. Check them out here: Paris Pictures

And if you haven't already... Say happy birthday to Becky in the Comments!!

Paris! (Part 1 of a few)

(This is part 1 of a multiple part series. To get to the other parts quickly and easily, click the links below)

Link to Part 2

Journey number two outside of Italy was, as has been alluded to, Paris. Oh Paris, Home of the Crepe, Eiffel Tower, and stuffy French people. But more on those topics later. Lets take this chronologically again shall we? I’m sure I’ll go off on tangents when I come across a topic I want to talk about. Clear your schedule for the immediate future, this is going to be a long one (I might break it up into different parts to give you a break from the reading, and my fingers a break from the typing, but this is bound to be my longest blog post to date, I’ve got a lot to say).

Friday:

This was a special trip because I met Becky (my wonderful girlfriend for those of you who do not know her) in Paris with a bunch of her friends to celebrate her 21st birthday, which happens to be today, so everyone wish Becky a Happy Birthday in the comments below. Okay, enough embarrassing Becky, I couldn’t help it.
So, as I was saying, the plan was to meet her and her friends in Paris for the weekend. Since they are all studying abroad in London, they had the opportunity to get to Paris on Thursday afternoon. So I decided to fly in as early as possible Friday morning. 7am flight from Rome FCO to Charles De Gaul airport. As it turns out, public transportation doesn’t run at 4:30 in the morning. So I bit the bullet and got a cab by myself to the airport. Since I got a cab, it took much less time than public transportation, So I got to the airport especially early. Lucky me. I think I may have been the first person through security that morning, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing except for the wait at the gate in the other end.

AirFrance:

I am now going to write a small testimony for Air France. Air France PR people, feel free to use this all over your website, so long as you link back to this wonderful blog. I decided to fly Air France from Rome to Paris instead of one of the normal budget airlines that us college students normally use. The main two being RyanAir (coincidence?) and EasyJet, but there are many more that fly specifically between different countries. Okay so reasons to fly AirFrance, well first off, it wasn’t that expensive. Actually it was comparable to the prices of EasyJet, which also flies into Charles De Gaul airport. RyanAir I ruled out because though it was much cheaper, it flies into an airport that is about two hours away from Paris itself. I was not looking to take a bus ride from the airport to the city that is shorter than my flight from Rome to Paris.
I cannot tell you how nice it was to fly AirFrance. I flew from one real airport to another, sat in a real gate, had the ability to check a bag if I wanted to, didn’t get hassled about my carry-on being too big, didn’t have to walk to and from my plane, had a nice comfortable seat with a generous amount of legroom, was given food and drink, and was not woken up by in-flight audio commercials. I could turn this into an entire blog post, but just know that everything listed there, the opposite is what RyanAir does. “Flying AirFrance was like flying First Class compared to RyanAir”-Ryan Mahoney (hint: AirFrance, use that line!). I need to stop getting distracted like that, this post will be long enough without it.

So the flight to Paris involved a lot of sleeping, which was nice, since I haven’t really ever been able to sleep at all on flights, must be a psychological thing or something. I landed in Paris around 9am, exited the plane and found my way towards the exit. Lucky for me public transportation was running in Paris at this point. Break for Metro tangent:

Paris Metro:

The Metro in Paris lives up to the stereotypes of French people: It tries to make itself out to being more sophisticated than any other European country, while really that complexity makes it fall on its face and look bad. Yes, the Paris metro is extensive and exhaustive in its amount of lines and stops that can get you basically anywhere. I cannot take that away from it. But many things about it just didn’t feel, right. First, I go to the ticket machine to buy a ticket. I had to take an RER (certain line in the metro) subway from the airport to get to the inner city. So I bought a Metro/RER ticket, for the standard metro ticket price. Problem is, you need a special RER ticket to go to and from airports. Why? Because they want to take my money, that’s why. So after failing multiple times at going through the gate with my regular ticket, I went back and figured out that I needed the other ticket. Oh well. This would not be the last problem with tickets though. One money saver tip is to buy a carnet or book of tickets, which is 10 tickets that can be used whenever. You pay 11.60 and get 10 tickets, where a single ride is 1.60. Quick math says you pay for 7.25 tickets and get 2.75 free. Cool I guess. So when we were using the metro in the city, there being 7 of us, we would buy a book of tickets and share and keep the extras toward the next ride, so it was more economical, see? Well it turns out when you want to ride the metro you should probably buy a couple extra tickets, because they are very temperamental. Everytime we got on the metro, someone’s ticket, which was just purchased, wouldn’t work. The machine would continuously reject it. So we would pass them one of the extras and that would work. We later tried passing back tickets that had just gone through the machine 1 minute before, and you know what? Yep, sometimes those worked even though they had already been used. The other quirky thing about the Paris metro, which I’m told is similar to D.C., is that you have to put your ticket through in order to exit the metro as well. See where this and our ticket fiasco might cause a problem? Yep you guessed it, tickets that had let us on the metro just 10 minutes before would not let us exit the metro. Really, I have no explanation for why this happened. I experimented with lots of different ways of putting the ticket in, walking through the turnstile, amount of time waiting for the other person to go through, where I stood etc…. and I really couldn’t figure it out. Maybe there’s a trick to it and we were just doing it wrong, a lot. I personally think its an evil scheme to confuse, frustrate tourists while gaining entertainment and profit from the locals. Apart from this, I found the signs to be confusing and not helpful. They tell you the direction of the train just like any other metro in the world, by telling you what the last stop in that direction is. Two problems with that. Many of the lines branch off into multiple directions towards the end of the line. The B RER train, which runs to and from the airports, has 4 “ends” to it. I know many of them have even more than this, but I used that line so I figured I would talk about what I know (or don’t know for that matter). The other problem is that many of the end stations have multiple names. It’ll be firstname-nextname-nameprobablyusedonasign. See how that can be confusing? The last name on the map is the one that is posted on signs. I’m sure it’s a more recognizable street or monument or direction to locals, but again, not so easy when you aren’t from around here.

Okay, this seems like a good spot for a break. Mostly because I have class now and want to post something before I head off for that. I’ll post part 2 as soon as I type it! Rest your eyes for a little bit, we've got a long way to go.