The trip to Paris definitely stuck to the theme of my blog... it was an adventure. It started with us waking up at the crack of dawn at 4:45 to get on the bus to get to the airport. I had about 5 sweaters on because I didn't have enough room in my backpack. I actually looked like the Michelin Man and my friend snapped a disgusting picture of me that no human should ever see, but I really did look 300 lbs. The flight was really easy, I slept of course the entire way. Thanks to Jordyn's friend who studied abroad in Paris last year, we had an awesome itinerary. It was packed with tours, museums, and restaurants for us to visit. Whoever you are Julie, thank you so much for that itinerary. Even with her directions of which metro to take, we still managed to get extremely lost on many adventures.
Once we landed, we headed to the hostel. We didn't have that much time because we had a 3.5 hour tour to attend. We followed Julie's directions verbatim and managed to conquer the metro system. We had our highs and lows with the metro system... more to come of that.. But anyway, we get to Hotel Bastille and find ourselves in a deceivingly nice lobby. We knew were getting our own room, for 20 Euro a night, but who really knew what this place looked like. Well, behind Door #1 we found ourselves hit with smell of bad Chinese food and doritos all blended together into this wonderfully rotten smell. We creep up the creepy stairs to find ourselves in Room 202. Ever since 4th grade, 202 has been my number, how ironic. We walk in to find a dorm size room with 4 beds. It appeared clean at a first glance and actually had a nice bathroom. The maid or helper lady, whatever you want to call her, pointed to the floor and said she was going to come back with the vacuum. Now, until you look at this picture it's going to be hard to describe how tiny this room was and she wanted to vaccuum it while there were 5 people total in the room? Well we don't speak French so we had no choice, but to watch her clean our room. After she left, we pulled up the blankets and discovered some creepy things. Over the weekend we discovered, hair, mucus, saliva, maybe blood, and other bodily juices. We later discovered the laundry room and they definitely wash the sheets, but this place was GROSS. We all slept on top of the sheet, with our faces/bodies on our scarves. Our sweatpants were tucked into our socks, our shirts tucked into our pants, and our hoods on. We also slept with the lights on because we were terrified. Terrified of what you might ask? I don't know.. we don't know.. but this place was strange.
With the help of some people on the street we headed in the direction of the Arc de Triomphe. We run up the steps for me to say, "Look there it is! And there.. over there... the Eiffel Tower!" Jordyn says, "Uh no way is that the Eiffel Tower, that's a satellite dish if anything." Hahahha we came all that way for that reaction? So anyway, we heard that the view from the top of the Arc de Triomphe is way better than the Eiffel Tower so we were going to listen and climb to the top. The Arc de Triomphe is in the middle of a traffic circle. There are no lights, no pauses, no spaces between the cars, just madness and we couldn't figure out how one safely gets across the road. There are children, and handy capped people over there so how did they get there? We kept asking everyone, but no one knew! Catherine kept wanting to cross the street and I kept pulling her back. Finally on the third try, we locked arms, I grabbed Jordyn and we ran across 8 lanes of French traffic. Funniest moment of my life. Catherine saying, "Go. Go now. Now. Go." to every car while Jordyn is screaming in my right ear. Marissa is safely standing on the sidewalk looking at her idiot friends. Marissa told us after she found the safe, tunnel to get to the other side that the police were screaming at us. Hey, sometimes you just have to be adventurous. I told Catherine and Jordyn on two separate occasions while we tried running across the street that they're too beautiful for anyone to deliberately hit them with their car so we continued to run through Paris after that. Also, after we ran across the street, Marissa asked a man if he knew how to get to the other side. He replied in a strong, French accent, "I don't know, but uhh I just saw three girls run across street and almost die!" Yep, her friends were those girls.
After we climbed down, we headed down Champs -Elysees which is a huge street with lots of famous stores and shops. Of course we ran into a few other girls we knew who were in Paris the same weekend. Such a small world. They informed us that the Louvre was free from 6-9 so we decided to head there at that time instead of going on Saturday. We took out our maps and somehow made it to the Louvre, but we needed a snack before we went in. We found this cute cafe and had creme brulee, chocolate mousse and strawberry sorbet. Of course, it was delicious. We headed to the museum and wanted to try and make some kind of dent, but when we got there we realized how enormous it really was so when I say we made a dent I mean we managed to see 1/50th of the place. Of course we power walked over to the Mona Lisa. I was so excited it felt like I was waiting to pick up an old friend at the airport. I just couldn't believe I was going to see her! Well, there she was. The size of a flat screen tv in anyone's dorm room. A little dissapointing, but whatever, I have now seen the Mona Lisa.
We walked on, seeing lots of Jesus and lots of nudity. All women are painted the same way, have the same bodies, same nipples, same everything. And Jesus, what would art do without Jesus. Jesus was everywhere. We made our way to see some of Michelangelo's sculptures and then dragged our tired bodies "home" to Bastille. We wanted to find a cute place to eat and we did! For 11 Euro, we were able to pick an appetizer and dinner. I had a stuffed avocado with shrimp and the girls all had quiche. Both were really, really good. Plus I've been craving an avocado for a month so I was extremely happy. Then our main meal came. Ordering was hard because we didn't know any of the words, but our server kind of helped us out. Jordyn and myself ordered steak with a gorgonzola sauce and potatoes. I had mine medium, hers medium well. Well, in Paris, medium means moo. They might as well have put the cow on my plate while he was still eating grass. I ate around mine, but Jordyn had so much left over so I just ate hers. Marissa ordered the most delicious pork and I finished hers off as well. Everyone was really happy with how it turned out. I finally had a legimite French meal.
We wanted to go out that night, but we were all exhausted and had to be up early. We decided to just head to bed. And when I say head to bed I mean, sleep with the lights on, don't move, don't breathe, and pray. Before we went to bed, Jordyn and I mapped out our itinerary for the next day downstairs in the lobby and made dinner reservations for the next night. Everything was perfect so we headed upstairs to shower.
This is one of my favorite parts of the story. Marissa and Catherine already had showered and just said, "Sara, just you wait. You are going to have a lot to write about this one." And they were right! I step into the shower with Jordyn's flip flops on because all of us forgot ours. There was no shower curtain, and no place to put the shower head. So I'm standing there, with hot water (woohoo!) and am just soaking the floor. Water, water everywhere. This shower brought back memories of the first few showers here in Sevilla before I fixed it. It's impossible to open up your shampoo and lather and repeat AND hold the shower head all at that same time. Marissa had talked about some squatting technique that she pulled off so that she wouldn't soak the floor, but at this point I said fuck it, I'm getting the floor wet. Since I was staying at Chateu de la Poo / Hotel del Shit I decided to make sure every knot was out of my hair and made sure that all of my thick curls headed down the drain. My way of "getting back" at the hotel. So after finishing up with my hair I had to figure out how to wash my face. I honestly felt like there should have been a camera filming me shower. The fact that there was no curtain made me feel like I was putting on a show. It was very, very odd and uncomfortable. So I get the face soap, and blindly almost fall backwards in the shower. I had to get out of there, quick. I grabbed a towel, praying it was clean, and tried my hardest not to slip and break my head on the soaking wet floor. I survived.
I put on my jammies and laid down to sleep. In the middle of the night I felt something on my neck. Was I dreaming? No. THERE WAS A FUCKING BUG ON MY NECK! So without panicking completely and waking everyone up, I managed to get some toilet paper and killed it. Ah, Hotel del Shit... such a beautiful place.
In the morning we were early to rise and headed towards our crepes. Ah, nutella and banana, freshly made for us. It was scrumdidlyumscious... good spelling, I know. I'm not obsessed at all with Nutella like my good friend Jordyn, but I enjoyed it. We ate our crepes in 2 minutes and then headed towards the metro which was practically in front of our hotel aka, our garbage dump. As we were right about to go down the steps to the metro we saw a man take all of these newspapers from a kiosk and throw them all over the ground. The owner of the kiosk runs out and tries collecting everything while trying to guard his business. Then the bad guy throws a glass bottle ontop of the kiosk. All of a sudden, the kiosk guy runs after the bad guy with a crow bar!! The four of us, somewhere in the middle of this stood their, trying to be in safety, with our jaws open. What the hell did we just witness????????????
We got on the metro and headed towards the Musee d'Orsay. My art teacher said this was his favorite museum in Paris. We saw Van Gogh's self portrait, Renoir, and some Monet. Degas and Monet were most shocking to me because since I was little I've learned about these famous artists and to see their work, in person is just mind blowing. Then, we headed to Musee de L'Orangarie aka, the orange museum to us. I was getting pretty good with my map at this point and found both museums pretty easily. This museum is by far the greatest museum I have ever been to. There was a special exhibit (half of the museum) of just Monet's water lillies. Four huge paintings filled a circular room. Everyone stood, and gazed at the masterpieces that were in front of our eyes. The next room, same thing. Four huge paintings, all in different shades of blues, greens, purples, and yellows and were absolutely exquisite. I almost shed a tear it was that beautiful.
Afterwards, we went to lunch at Angelina's which Julie recommended. Supposedly it has the best hot chocolate and French onion soup. We shared, because it was expensive, but well worth it. Hey, that's what budgeting is all about. The hot chocolate literally was a melted chocolate bar. They serve it in a little bowl and then you pour it into your own cup and put fresh whipped cream on top. YUM! Then the French onion soup... yea yuh! The cheese was so yummy, bread, toasty yet soggy and the soup itself was really delicious. Sometimes people put way too much sherry in their soup. This was perfect. By the end Jordyn was licking the chocolate bowl, and I was scraping the cheese off of the rim. We couldn't have looked any more in Heaven. This place was fancy, fancy. The waitress was such a bitch, and wanted nothing to do with us. Eh, she fit the French stereotype. By the way, my French accent was getting really good by now. I couldn't stop speaking English with a French accent. It was getting addicting, but at the same time, I couldn't believe how comfortable I was with Spanish. We all kept saying "Senor!" or "Si, si!"... well in France it's "Monsieur!" and "Oui, oui," not "Si, si." I loved Paris, but I really missed Sevilla. Especially because of that gloomy weather! Everyone there kept saying that this weekend was the nicest weather in 3 months. Well, that's just depressing. We come from a quaint, sunny city. We were a bunch of Americans, claiming to be Spaniards, and were missing out city a little bit.
But, we had more to see. We headed towards the Latin Quarter and went inside Notre Dame. Before that though, we experienced a French public bathroom. Yum. Everywhere in France they have pink toilet paper. In that public bathroom, we had to walk through a little gate, as if I were about to get on a ride at Disney World. Then, the bathroom attendant started unraveling tons of pink toilet paper and mopped the floor with it. Ew. We got out of there as quickly as possible. I needed an oxygen tank, for real.
We headed inside the church, blah blah blah, looks like any other church or cathedral. It was cool though. Then we headed for our tour of the Latin Quarter. Our tour guide was a little odd and needed a tweezer for his uni-brow. The 2 Euro I gave him at the end of the tour is definitely enough money to buy a tweezer. I should have dropped a hint...
We pushed through them and the guy in charge told us where exactly to sit. Every inch needs to be taken up so each group is placed in a specific seating order. He put out his hand and made me and Jordyn climb over the table (in our dresses) to get to the other side of the table. Forget about peeing, it wasn't an option. We quickly received a complintary little drink and a plate full of snacks. Cubed cheeses, meats, olives, pickles, and spicy potato salad. We were asked if we wanted red or white wine, and received our bottles. We took about.... 100 pictures. Then we were asked if we wanted cheese or meat fondue, we got both since we were 4 people and it's split between two. It quickly came out and WOW OH WOW. I could have died of happiness. I've had fondue, but this was unbelievable. We had as much bread as humanly possible for the cheese, and a bowl full of meat for us to cook ourselves in a bowl of some hot liquid. I didn't speak words for the first 15 minutes because I truly was so damn happy. We ate and ate and ate and drank and drank and drank until we couldn't breathe. Then we ate a little more and left. Before leaving we headed to get our coats and someone opened the bathroom door. There, the toilet seat, was a swiss cheese toilet seat!!! Us full, and drunk silly girls laughed and laughed. We now had food babies, I thought I legitimately gained 10 lbs that meal. But we had places to go so we headed towards the Eiffel Tower to see it sparkle!!
Okay so we're on the train, we meet these nice, cute boys and look out the window to see the Eiffel Tower! Holy shit, right infront of our faces! There it was! And wow, it was so beautiful. We took lots of pictures, I Mom Danced (the Brits loved it by the way) and then they left. What losers. But we took lots of pictures once 12:00 hit and the whole tower was sparkling. What a site to see!
The next morning we woke up, maybe a little too early because nothing was open. We did manage to find this amazing bakery so we had breakfast there. We put our bags in the basement of the hotel. Seemed a little shady to me, but we did get to see the laundry room and that the sheets are in fact washed.
We headed towards the Jewish Quarter. Most of the stores were opening at 11:00 so we walked around a little. We shopped and then finally went over the best falafel place in the Jewish quarter that Lenny Kravitz claims it's the best ever. Some hot Jewish boys served us and DAMN that falafel was delicious. After devouring our sandwiches, we went shopping and I found the greatest gift for my mama. Clearly I can't talk about it here because it has to be a surprise, but let's just say I spent some good time in an art gallery arguing with the gallery lady to give me what I wanted. She loved "it" so much she didn't want to give it up. Tough shit lady! It's coming home to New Jersey.
We shopped a little more, got some cute things, and headed back to grab out stuff to get to the airport.
Well, here comes the "adventure" part. We hopped on the RER B towards the airport. Us idiots realized we were going the wrong direction. We asked some French dude who was lingering over us if we were going the right way but he coudn't understand what Jordyn was saying. So then I attempt French and say aeropuerto( Spanish) in a French accent and he understood me and also Marissa was using bat arms to describe the plane. Woohoo! Well yea, wrong direction. So instead of waiting for the next stop, we got up and booked it. The beeping noise for "doors are closing" had started and I'm like OH SHIT! We are not all going to make it. Marissa leaps off first. I'm standing at the edge ready to hold the doors open. I see the other two in the corner of my eye and we all jump. Catherine BARELY made it. Could you imagine, Catherine, my beautiful ginge, in her white coat with her backpack stuck in the train and her body on the outside? Oh my, my. Everyone on the train was cheering for us. So we all stood there jumping up and down, cheering and laughing. Man, France was lucky to have us. The amount of French people that got a laugh out of us in 3 days... let me tell you... hundreds. We were those embarassing Americans. So anyway, we realize how much of a rush we're in so we sprint towards the gate to get to the other side of the track. Now let me explain, theres the silver bar you push through with your hips then a little green door that opens. You have to put your ticket in first but many people like to jump it or tag along with someone else. This ticket wasn't any normal ticket, it was like 10 bucks and ours weren't working! With the adrenaline of us being late, and all the French pushing through us running off of trains, the four of us all managed to find our own way of getting on the other side. I looked at the bar and thought over or under. Why God, why would I choose under. So there I went. I dove underneath the bar with my backpack on my back and realized the door isn't going to open. There I was, stuck, and in panic mode. All that could be seen was my squished face sticking out of the door. Marissa was dying of laughter. At the same time, Catherine decides to go over the bar. But she got stuck between the door. The two of us, completely stuck. Jordyn antelopes it over a bar that had an open door. Lucky bitch. Somehow some guy opened the door for me and motioned to help me through, of course, I dove underneath again. What was I thinking!? I have a scraped knee now, I look like a four year old.
We got on the other train and laughed for the next 2 hours. Still, days later, we all talk about that moment and crack up. Marissa is actually laughing right now as she's writing her own blog. After the train, we sprinted to the airport. Literally, sprinted. Jordyn has a video of us running with our 8 layers of clothing and heavy ass backpack. We sprinted their to find that the plane was delayed. All that running for nothing!
Finally we boarded and it was so nice to hear "Hola" y "Gracias!" Ah Spain, how I love you so. It was an amazing weekend full of art, history, and cheese, but it made me appreciate Sevilla so much. Some things I've learned from Paris... The French do smell, borates really are worn by everyone, baguettes are everywhere, croissants are the most unbelievablely simple, yet delicious pastry, no matter how hard you push, the metro door won't open and Paris, you really do have the best cheese.
Madrid tomorrow. Peace out kids
