Paris...

Paris

City of love, romance, passion…. I saw none of these things. For the most part I witnessed expensive food shopping and cars mixed in with old buildings and a strange Korean hostel.

For us the trip to Paris started off by trying to find our hostel. For the most part so far this has not been a terribly difficult ordeal. This time however it turned out to be fairly complicated. At the train station we first had to untangle the ball of string that is the Paris subway map and find our stop… right at the very end of a line. So far things were not looking exceptionally good, but we moved on. Now we decided it was time to fire up the lap top and write the directions the hostel  gave us down on paper. At this point life started to get very interesting.  So with sketchy directions in hand and a vague idea of how to find the metro station we wanted we wandered through the building looking for the metro station to start at.

After about an hour we found ourselves outside the metro station in what can only be described as the suburbs of Paris, nowhere near the center.  Now we looked at the directions and took our first tentative steps along the path they set out for us. A first 60 steps, south from the station according to the paper. Where we should find a narrow ally way on the left that is probably not marked… oh boy. Well after 60 steps we where beside a hedge but another  23 steps later brought us to an ally way that did happen to be labelled. So being close enough to 60 if you were only rounding to the nearest 100 we decided to go this way.  After following the labyrinth of directions we finally ended up going down the wrong street and were really starting to doubt finding this place at all. When off in the distance the sound of English voices with an Australian accent come to our rescue. Walking down a dirt path out of some kind of park they say. Hey you looking for the hostel? Its right over there. How did you get on this street?

And in a matter of minutes we were there. Looking at a hostel with Korean letters on the door and a happy but flustered woman leaning out of the window. We were let in and shown to our room then left to decipher the mystery of the communal shoes and various notes… such as no bathroom after midnight… what did that mean. What if I have to pee at 12:01? How strict is this rule? What if I get in there by 11:59? As it turns out only the shower was off limits after midnight. Guess they didn’t want any gremlins. Apart from being hard to find, having strange shoe related habits and no keys at all this hostel was nice and clean with a solid internet connection.

Day one in Paris was unfortunate to say the least, had we left the next day as planned we would have not enjoyed Paris at all.

The day started out dark and just cloudy enough that we chose to bring hoodies but not rain coats. As it turned out this was the wrong choice as it started raining almost immediately upon getting off the metro in the city center. Our first stop was the notra dame cathedral. And boy was it creepy. I must say that having that as your church would certainly shake the fear of god right into you. With gargoyles and towers and stone worked filigree it was basically something out of a fantasy novel. Well perhaps more accurately it was something to inspire a fantasy novel. We took pictures of the outside and even took a stroll through the interior.  After a lunch of 16 euro hamburger we set off down the street through a cute little shopping area and poked into various stores. One was a shirt store that sold the most flamboyant collection of shirts I have ever seen. Others where chocolate shops and pastyr shops and a hat shop. In this particular shop I fell in love with a hat and being how it was cold out and my sweater has no hood I justified its purchase and have added a more grown up hat, one without horns to my winter head wear collection.  The rest of the day was mostly spent in various stages of disappointment and bad mood.  We went to the Louvre mostly with the intention of seeing the monalisa and it was ok. Small, looks nice, was underwhelming. This is how I felt about the Louvre in general. The sculptures were my favorite part the stone seemed to have a lot of life. The paintings were nice if very full of religion but for the most part we spent a lot of time wondering who decided that these pictures and sculptures in particular where the fantastic works of art that should be on display here. Who decided that Picasso was so great… I really don’t know. So after that we wandered around the city and decided for the most part paris is like any city big and loud. Eventually we got to this area referred to as the Latin Quarter and that was more fun. Here we had dinner and then went back to the Louvre because Erin was convinced it had some kind of light show at night… well it did light up, but that was about it and without the addition of the fountains it was fairly unimpressive.  After waiting for an hour for a light show that was not delivered erin realized she was in desperate need of a toilet. On the way to the metro there was many signs depicting toilets and indicating where they might be found however Paris did not deliver on this promise.  

The next day we set out with half hearted hope that Paris would be fun and set out to the mulon rouge. Here we found an interesting theater on a street full of sex shops and peep shows, complete with creepy guys in baggy pants coming out of the theaters. .. yeah you go city of romance.

So after a breakfast of a chocolate tart and our fill of laughing at the sex stores we set off to the Eiffel tower hoping that Paris would not disappoint us once more.

This time we were pleasantly surprised, the tower was really quite impressive and really neat to look at. We spent some time walking around it and then went for what can probably be called the best croissant of my life and some hot beverages at a small cafe where we could see the top of the tower through the trees. This was the wonderful Paris moment I had been waiting for. After this we walked back by the tower and found something resembling a fitness festival complete with zoomba on center stage. Naturally we had to join in. after a few songs we left and went back to the Latin Quarter for dinner. Once again the food was good and we indulged in French onion soup that can only be described as fantastic. Once dinner was finished we trekked back to the Eiffel tower for a light show we were still convinced might happen. So we sat down on the grass to wait. At about 8:30 the lights turned on and we got ourselves some crepes and ate them while waiting for the tower to “sparkle” this we got to see at 9 pm and took some pictures. We went back to our hostel soon after this glad that Paris had put in such an effort to redeem itself to us. 

my new hat

louvre at night

eiffel tower at night.... see much more impressive

one of the hillarious sex stores