Paris!

Being 2 hours journey to Paris isn't a frequent occurance, so we decided to seize the opportunity. One of the sisters from Acton is French, but unfortunately our efforts to go with her were unsucessful. Consequently, we blundered off to France alone, relying on our traveling insticts to guide us through a foreign country with an unfamiliar language. We left home at 5:30 in the morning, (Which means we had to wake up at around 415. Keep that in mind. -Eric) and took the first Picadilly train of the day to the internaitonal rail station. We had to pick up our tickets from e-booking and go through mild security, but overall the process was painless other than the reading on the clock. We were taking the Eurostar train, they are high speed and go all over Europe. The ride is smooth and quiet, for a journey under 4 or 5 hours I would much prefer this to flying. The trip was between 2 and 3 hours, and we arrived around 10 local time. We had some difficulty figuring out the train tickets, but eventually secured a one day pass. We took the metro(underground) to the nearest Seine River stop, which was Notre Dame catheldral. Here we got tickets for a river tour, which ended up being a non-guided, hop on-hop off style tour. I would reccommend getting a spoken tour, it makes it much more interesting. We cruised the river for 45 minutes, and eventually got off at the Eiffel Tower stop. Intial impression: it is an amazing large strucure, but not as glamourous as I imagined. I expected a shining metal spire, but it is painted dull brown and the area underneath is completely infested with souvenier sellers. This is no exaggeration either, which walking underneath you will be approched by at least 10 people jingling their miniature towers(each seller has the exact same merchandise), and pass by dozens of little towels layed out with more replicas of every color and size. We admired it for a little bit, and then decided we were hungry so we marched off in hunt of food. We found a nice street cafe, where my steak was only .9 Euro more than Eric's burger, and the wine was cheaper than the soft drinks. We enjoyed the atmosphere(the waiter being terribly frustrated with us, and the smokers all outside with us), and took in the sights. We walked back to the large lawn in front of the Tower, and took the classic goofy pictures leaning on. Unfortunately we're unable to show you these pictures, for my camera decided it wanted to stop storing pictures at this point in the day, and then promptly resumed storage on the train home. We then paid 4 dollars for the right to climb the stairs, to the first and second level. The view was really nice from there, and the second level was only half way up. The line was really long and it was raining, so we decided to pass on the top level this time. We went down and then walked for a bit, really just wandering around. We caught a bus out to that big square arch thing that the Tour de France finshes at. It was big and old and impressive, but not really much to do. We walked some more, caught another bus, and walked around a bit. Admittedly we were a little lost for what to do in the city, but it was nice to see it. We then found another bus down to the river for dinner. We had to walk around for 20 minutes to find a place that: 1)was in our price range, and 2)had a menu in English. We finally found one and had some nice lasagne and steak. Afterwards we walked down one of the wide avenues, caught the metro to the station, and checked in for our train. It was an easy journey back, rolled into London around 11:00, and finlly arrived home around 11:30, exhausted. (Oh and if you are ever traveling in Paris, just letting you know all the streets look the exactly the same and it can be hard to find out which road you are on because the signs are small and hard to see. So most of the time we had no clue where we were. But i thought it was nice to be walking around a city so famous as Paris. -Eric)