Paris

The Valencian holiday called El Puente allowed us a week off school. The program I am in planned a trip to Morocco however I took the time instead to travel about Europe a bit, consisting of an 8-day adventure to Paris and then to Dublin.

Paris was an interesting site to see. I was joined by my travel companion extraordinaire, Kate.


Saturday, October 4
6:20pm Depart Valencia by plane
8:00pm Landed at Paris-Beauvais Airport

We flew RyanAir, a discount airline, and for the discount in price they don't always fly you right to the city of your destination. In this case we landed in Beauvais, which was 1hour 20minute, 13 euro bus ride to the Port Maillot in Paris. Once there we grabbed a cab to our hostel and checked in. It was getting pretty late so we found a little restaurant by our hostel and grabbed some dinner and called it a night.

Sunday, October 5
Awoke to find that overnight I had gained a year in age... from 21 to 22. What an exciting way to ring in the new year. Paris is quite large and so we decided it'd be best for us to utilize the metro for transportation around the city. We stood in line for tickets and quickly realized it was going to be a nightmare because we didn't speak French. As we got closer to the window we noticed a paper that advertised all-inclusive public transport passes, and so we were able to buy a 2-day pass. Cost us 7 euros a day, and it was well worth it. Saved us all kinds of time waiting in line to purchase single-trip passes and ultimately saved us money as well. Also, because we paid for them we felt compelled to see as much as we could to get our investment's worth. We first went to the Notre Dame. Walked around there for a bit and toured inside. The Louvre was a short walk away so we checked that out as well. The place was packed with tourists so we opt'ed to wait until the next day to go inside, but got a healthy dose of photos taken outside. As accustomed to the afternoon siesta in Spain we decided to go have one and gather some strength for the evening. When we woke we dressed up fancy and went out for a very enjoyable evening together over dinner and a bottle of wine. The perfect birthday gift.

Monday, October 6
Our last day in Paris and so we got going around 10am. We decided to take the metro to the other side of the city and work our way back towards the hostel. We went to the Arc de Triomphe first and got some quality photos. Paid to climb the thing and got an excellent panorama of Paris. Then we took the metro to the Eiffel Tower. What shocked me the most is how gargantuan in size the thing is. Pictures in magazines or on TV don't do it justice... it is truly a massive structure. Next we walked to the Louvre and although it was still rather packed with tourists we paid and went inside. We quickly realized this museum is very spacious. It would take someone a few weeks to give all the art it's adequate attention. We did a whirlwind tour of all the stuff we wanted to see in about 1.5 hours. This included the Mona Lisa, the section of Spanish paintings, and what interested us most was the Egyptian section. Once it was time to leave it took us a little over an hour to find the exit. The place is massive and the signs to the exit lead to dead ends. It was literally a maze trying to get out. We were both very frusterated because we were tired and hungry. When we finally made it out we stopped and got some lunch. We had to wake up very early to make it to the bus back to Beauvais in the morning so we had an early night.

Tuesday, October 7
Woke up at 5am because we had to get to the other side of the city by 6:15am for our bus to Beauvais. We had become professional metro riders at this time so we decided to use that because it'd be way cheaper than a taxi across town. We paid for the metro and waited but it never came. It was 5:30am and the metro had just opened for operation. In a scramble we grabbed a taxi and let Paris rape our pocketbooks once more before we happily said, "au revoir!" We made it with about 3 minutes to spare before the bus left and snagged the last 2 open seats. We had to hang out around the airport for a few hours, which literally had only 4 gates at it, but finally made it on the plane and looked forward to the next part of our adventure in Dublin.