Paris, France

Paris, France.

The following post dates for Thursday, June 21^st.

We made it. But first, the rest of the day.

Woke up, packed, blogged, breakfast-ed, went to class, ate fast lunch, headed to train station.

Ok so now to Paris. On this trip there are only 8 of us: Me, Lesley, Deepa, Laura, Jennifer, Michelle, Michael, and Kacie. This is the first trip that there are more people staying in Cambridge than traveling. I suppose there are a couple reasons for why this is. 1. We have our second exam on Monday, so there won’t be much time to study. 2. Many people are traveling afterward or have traveled before hand, so Paris isn’t exactly a priority as of now. 3. Some people (Ani) are restricted by their government and can’t go anywhere.

So first we took the tube to the Waterloo train station. We got there well before hand and went through security and the such. Getting on the train was painful. So our cabin was overrun with little children, and they were sitting in our seats. This French lady kept telling me to go sit in the other cabin, and I kept showing her my ticket saying, “You are in my seat.” Then his funny English dude was like, “Usually we have to sit in our assigned seats, but in France, you must adapt to the situation.” So we moved to the other cabin and got settled. THEN the freaking adults the kids were traveling with decided that they should move to the CORRECT cabin and we had to move AGAIN. So we had to fight through the aisles and get over these little children. Then this older kid called me Jackie Chan, at which point I started running little kids over, smashing them into seats, and pinning them bent over chairs. Excusemoi. Jennifer and ran over some many kids. Evetually we got settled again.

The train took around 3 hours, and we lost one due to change in time zone. So we step outside the train station and don’t really know where to go. This is when we turned to our secret weapon Ms. Lesley Latham. Now what Lesley failed to tell us for the entire time we’ve known her is that she actually went to middle school in Paris. She can speak French. She knows what she’s doing. Thus we turned to her and she came through. We navigated our way with little trouble to our hotel. This trip, we decided against staying in a hostel due to time constraints, availability, and convenience. I was a little sad at first because we would be paying more, and my bank account is running low (Mom if you are reading this, it means I need to borrow some money. Merci). But the hotel turned out to be really great, props to Jennifer and Laura. We ended up staying at a Best Western. So the way it worked was the eight of us basically had a section of the hotel entirely to ourselves. Four rooms, 2 people each. Here’s the pairing: Lesley and Michelle, Me and Michael, Jennifer and Laura, Kacie and Deepa. It was great, we all kept our doors open and just walked from room to room and hung out. I brought my laptop, as always, so I could play music and we all could hear it. I think the song of choice on the trip was Home, by Michael Buble. It was very Parisian. Ok the only draw back was the bed situation. Every room had only a double bed, if even a double. It was kinda small. So Michael and I have gotten to know each other over he trip, but this should make us a whole lot closer literally and figuratively. Hopefully no weird stuff happens in the middle of the night or he will be sleeping on the ground. Just kidding. But seriously, no weird stuff.

Ok so we unpacked and rested for a little bit before heading out for some dinner. We were recommended to this café within walking distance from our hotel. The food turned out to be really great. I ate this lamb dish with French fries. 15 euros, but delicious. When I think about it, if you read through this blog I don’t think you’ll find a single instance where I haven’t liked what I ate. Anyways we all had great conversation and laughed a lot. I really like our group.

So the plan next was to go to the Eiffel Tower for a special showing that they would be putting on at midnight. Today the 21^st of June is the longest day of the year. The lady at the hotel said it was going to be special but we didn’t know what it was going to be. Anyways so the walk over was a lot of fun and we made our way over just in time. The tower is normally lit up at night but tonight they turned on sparkling lights all over the tower. It was ok.

Just kidding, it was really impressive.

Background on me. I’ve been to Europe before and Paris was one of our stops. We spent the longest time of all our stops in Paris. Thank you to my parents Alex and Ping for the amazing vacation. So, I’ve seen most of the sites in Paris. But that was summer of 8^th grade, so about 7 years ago. I’ve really looked forward coming back since I didn’t fully appreciate and enjoy where I was.

Tangent completed. The tower was gorgeous. We found a nice spot and laid in the grass and just watched the lights. We snapped a few photos and then walked around for a bit. There were so many people there at night. Mostly native Parisians hitting on tourist women, our girls included. Jennifer and Laura had an encounter with some guy who enjoyed talking really close to their face. But they were able to avoid him. Not that this guy was a threat or anything, but I probably should have been around somewhere nearby. Sorry girls.

After the tower, we walked back. It was pretty late at night and we almost missed the last metro. Actually, one of the lines was closed down, so we had to walk a couple blocks to get back to the hotel. Again Lesley guided us the entire night and we got there relatively easily. Great job Lesley.

Ok it’s time for bed. We have a really busy day ahead of us tomorrow. Back to the Eiffel tower to go to the top, the Musee’ De Orsay for some impressionist art, and then the Louvre to top it off, with stops for food dispersed in between. Au Revoir.

-James