Paris in a Nutshell

Hello again my faithful readers!! Thanks for taking interest in my Paris adventure- I visited for two days and one night and pretty much hit all the main attractions so this is pretty much a quick sweep of Paris.  I hope you enjoy every last word!
When we first arrived to Paris we immediately set out to find our hostel.  My dearest travel companion/roommate Paula took the liberty of Google mapping the directions from the train station to the hostel the night before we left, so we had it all figured out. Or that’s what we thought.  If I could explain Paris in one word, that word would be “confusing.”  What we basically faced was walking down one road in search for the next in our directions, then that road branching into literally four other roads all with similar names in French.  After about an hour of walking and guessing roads and guessing directions we found a Paris road map and decrypted it only to find out… we went the wrong direction when we turned out of the train station.  Surprised?  Yeah, I wasn’t either.  So after we traced our steps back and carried onward in the right direction we finally found our hostel after another hour.  This might sound unfortunate Reader, but honestly I’m not all that upset we had to walk that much. I felt like I really got to experience the streets of Paris, and overall it was a pleasant little adventure.  The picture below is a small demonstration of such streets, basically just picture another street on each side of the photo and that's what we had faced.

BUT even though I appreciated the walk through Paris, let you not be mistaken of my relief to finally arrive at the hostel.  We arrived to check-in around 10 a.m. and… you guessed it!  Check in time wasn’t until 2 p.m.!   Perfect.  Well we were starving anyway so we figured that we would get some breakfast then figure out the Paris underground (subway) system and find something cool to do.  We went to a café next our hostel and had breakfast.  We each got coffee, orange juice, a croissant, and a piece of bread.  Side note: there’s a reason the French are known for their bread and croissants…. They are delicious.  Let me also make it known that I thoroughly enjoyed French coffee whilst I was in Paris also, something I didn’t expect to be fond of there.  One very popular way of drinking coffee (which can be seen in the US, just usually isn’t) is to drink espresso shots.  So often you’ll see someone sitting in a café with a little tiny mini cup of coffee, a shot.  After that we headed to the nearest underground station.  The Paris equivalent of London’s “Tube” system is called the Metro.  I was not a huge fan of the Metro.  Compared to the Tube, the Metro is very dirty, smells (a lot of times like pee, which my roommate and I tend to use to describe the smell of Paris) and a bit older.  There’s also a lot more beggars in Paris and on the Metro people would beg sometimes by playing instruments then asking for money, or simply by walking around seat to seat asking people.  It was however the easiest and cheapest form of transportation so we made due.

After our morning wanderings we decided to visit Notre Dame first, the place where, indeed, the Disney story "Hunchback of Notre Dame" was based.  Whether or not that's based off of a true story I cannot say, but it's fun to imagine.  It's basically... a really big cathedral.  We didn't go on a guided tour so I'm sad to say that I do not know much more about this piece of history. :(

After we went inside (which was beautiful of course) we went for a walk and sat on a bench behind Notre Dame to take in the scenery.  A lady then approached us and shoved a piece of paper in our faces.  Paula, being the nice person that she is, agreed to sign the paper which at first sight looked like a petition of some sort.  Apparently the cause was for mute and deaf people, and when you signed it you had to pledge money.  I’m going to end the story here simply because it’s embarrassing and shameful but we got ripped off and we’re pretty sure that lady wasn’t mute.  After that experience Paula and I promised ourselves we would be more aware of beggars and cheats.  But back to the happy- after that we got crepes!!  This was exciting because France is known for crepes and they were delicious!!  We wandered around the area a little bit longer then headed back to check into our hostel.  Our hostel was livable… but definitely not my favorite experience so far.  So in order to spend as minimal time there as possible, we set out on another adventure; after all we were only there for two days.  We used the good ole’ smelly metro to make our way toward the Eiffel Tower, we both really wanted to see it lit up at night.  The Eiffel Tower was, of course, incredibly beautiful and I got to see both in the day time and the night time!  After studying it from a distance we made our way to the base of the tower and there we sat… for about an hour and a half.  It was quite cold but we bought hot chocolate and enjoyed where we were.  That is, we enjoyed it aside from being harassed by people trying to constantly sell you dinky little Eiffel Tower souvenirs… so annoying. We stuck around for so long so we could see the Tower sparkle (as it does about once every hour once it’s dark) and it was beautiful!  The first photo below is the tower sparkling, and the second was earlier that day in all its cloudy glory. 

After the first and only (thank goodness) night at the hostel, we woke up and packed our stuff since we wouldn’t be going back to the hostel before we left Paris.  We took the Metro to one of Paris’s main streets where on one side stood the Arc De Triomph and on the other was the Louvre.  First we made our way to the Louvre, one of the the biggest art museums in the world; home of Mona Lisa. 

 The picture above is the entrance to the Louvre.  You have to go down an escalator, and there's actually a HUGE mall under ground, as well as an art museum.  I didn't actually go see Mona (I heard it was pretty overrated) but I had fun exploring the area.  A fun fact, they filmed part of "The Da Vinci Code" here with Nicholas Cage.  Good movie, I definitely recommend it. 

After the Louvre, we walked the strip aaaall the waaaay to the Arc De Triomph, but I’m glad we did. We had to sit down a couple times to recoup for the rest of the walk, but it was worth it.  

 The photo above shows the monument and the traffic driving around it.  The monument was built to commend French troops under Napoleon's rule that died in war.  Around it you can see (but not very well from my picture) one of the biggest round abouts in the world, and also one of the most dangerous.  There's about 12 lanes of traffic (ish) and no lines to separate them... needless to say, there's been lots of wrecks.

After we got our fill of Paris sight seeing we went to the bus station.  We ended up hanging out at the bus stations for a little longer than we probably needed to before we departed, but Paula and I were extremely exhausted and needed some down time.  So we had some coffee (yum) and played mash (haha) and just relaxed until it was time to check in for the train.  As awesome as the things I saw were, and as glad as I am that I got to experience them, I was certainly ready to go home and was glad my Paris adventure had come to an end.

Hope everyone is doing well and still enjoying my posts!!

Next blog will be about Germany and Prague!

-KYRA:)