If I attempted to write my France entries like previous blog posts I would be here forever and may never finish, so my two weeks in France will be a much more cut down version (I imagine for some this may actually come as a relief and you may be able to get the time to read them all too!). Bit of background first, I was traveling through France with Jodi and Vania who I went to Tga Girls with back in the day, but at the end of the two weeks I was heading back to London and they were continuing onto Italy for a further two weeks (with Vania going even more places after that as she was doing her last travels through Europe before heading back to NZ).
This is how my adventure started; sitting at the train station waiting to jump on the connection to St Pancreas international where Jodi and I would leave London for Paris, and I receive a phone call from Jodi saying she'd only just woken up, hadn't packed and wasn't sure if she'd make it! Um... s***! And she had my train ticket to Paris! Nothing like a small heart attack to start your traveling. Thankfully she arrived in one piece with time to spare thanks to some help from her flatmates and a black cab. Unfortunately, sitting on the train to Paris, Jodi realised she'd left her Interrail ticket on the floor at home, a very expensive pre-paid ticket for all her train journeys in the next four weeks. This was not a good start!
After negotiating the France metro system with no experience with the French language (Vania became our savior later with her school cert french!) we made our way to the Hostel to meet up with Vania. Thanks to three of us traveling a lot of our accommodation was in triple rooms, comfy and quiet. It was a great way to do it.
Over the next couple of days we visited various Paris attractions. We were staying in Montmartre, a popular artsy area, and enjoyed a walk up the hill to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur (Sacred Heart Basilica), a gorgeous church with great views of Paris. We queued up early the next morning to visit the Eiffel Tower when it first opened, and we were very happy we did when we saw the queues on the way back down. Sadly the weather didn't want to play nice, it was windy, raining and freezing cold! None of use had really packed for cold weather so we almost froze at the top. At least the views were pretty amazing.
We walked up to the Arc De Triomphe which sits in the middle of a 12 road roundabout! It's incredible, I've never seen anything like it. How drivers negotiate it, I just don't know. Luckily for us pedestrians they have an underground walkway that pops you up in the middle to see the Arc. From there we walked down Avenue des Champs-Élysées, one of the most famous roads in the world (and one of the most expensive). Here you would find rows of Parisian cafes and patisseries along with shops like Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Versace. Nothing quite like seeing a $100,000+ necklace in a shop window.
On to the Louvre with its beautiful square and gardens. The building itself was pretty breathtaking too. The pyramids look a little out of place but it is cool when you're inside the big one. The Louvre was enormous! I couldn't believe how big it was, you could spend days wondering it's corridors. We stuck to a couple of things we wanted to see; the Venus de Milo (gorgeous up close), The Winged Victory of Samothrace (I hadn't heard of this one before but it was beautiful!) and of course the Mona Lisa.
The Mona Lisa was very small, which plenty of people had told me before, and the crowds were huge which made it difficult to see it very well but it was a beautiful painting to view and the atmosphere is different to any other museum you'll encounter. I also loved the walls and ceilings of the Louvre which were often themselves painted with incredible images.
The Notre Dame Cathedral sits on an island in the middle of the Seine river and it was simply gorgeous. It had the most intricate carvings and towers and the inside was beautiful with it's columns, stained glass windows and hundreds of candles. I could have spent hours in there it was so pretty.
The next day Jodi and I headed for the Catacombs while Vania had some admin stuff to do. The Catacombs are an underground ossuary containing human bones from as far back as the 1700s that were moved there because of an overflow in Paris cemeteries and the diseases resulting from improper burials at the time. The bones were stacked in sections of an old underground quarry and many are arranged in patterns and have been open to the public since the early 19th century. It was one of the scariest places I've ever been. Thousands of skulls and bones, stacked in neat piles that went on forever! It really was a pretty creepy experience.
We met up with Vania in the afternoon to check out Moulin Rouge (sadly it was too expensive to see a show) and to enjoy some more samples of yummy Paris cafes, including raw mince (that was Vania, not me!).
Jodi was still waiting on her Interrail ticket which she had her flatmate courier to her (and was supposed to arrive in plenty of time.. but they lost it... Jodi was not having much luck on this trip), but Vania and I were keen to get out of Paris and accommodation was scarce so Vania & I went onto Tours (our next stop) while Jodi stayed in Paris. We had booked our train tickets and we were heading to the other side of Paris to the right station when things started to go wrong; our metro train broke down and we had to negotiate a different way, then the RER fast train was chocka and we couldn't get on, time was ticking by and we found ourselves bolting through stations Amazing Race style. We made it, just! I swear we had like 60sec to spare. I didn't know how many more things could possibly go wrong :)
If I attempted to write my France entries like previous blog posts I would be here forever and may never finish, so my two weeks in France will be a much more cut down version (I imagine for some this may actually come as a relief and you may be able to get the time to read them all too!). Bit of background first, I was traveling through France with Jodi and Vania who I went to Tga Girls with back in the day, but at the end of the two weeks I was heading back to London and they were continuing onto Italy for a further two weeks (with Vania going even more places after that as she was doing her last travels through Europe before heading back to NZ).
This is how my adventure started; sitting at the train station waiting to jump on the connection to St Pancreas international where Jodi and I would leave London for Paris, and I receive a phone call from Jodi saying she'd only just woken up, hadn't packed and wasn't sure if she'd make it! Um... s***! And she had my train ticket to Paris! Nothing like a small heart attack to start your traveling. Thankfully she arrived in one piece with time to spare thanks to some help from her flatmates and a black cab. Unfortunately, sitting on the train to Paris, Jodi realised she'd left her Interrail ticket on the floor at home, a very expensive pre-paid ticket for all her train journeys in the next four weeks. This was not a good start!
After negotiating the France metro system with no experience with the French language (Vania became our savior later with her school cert french!) we made our way to the Hostel to meet up with Vania. Thanks to three of us traveling a lot of our accommodation was in triple rooms, comfy and quiet. It was a great way to do it.
Over the next couple of days we visited various Paris attractions. We were staying in Montmartre, a popular artsy area, and enjoyed a walk up the hill to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur (Sacred Heart Basilica), a gorgeous church with great views of Paris. We queued up early the next morning to visit the Eiffel Tower when it first opened, and we were very happy we did when we saw the queues on the way back down. Sadly the weather didn't want to play nice, it was windy, raining and freezing cold! None of use had really packed for cold weather so we almost froze at the top. At least the views were pretty amazing.
We walked up to the Arc De Triomphe which sits in the middle of a 12 road roundabout! It's incredible, I've never seen anything like it. How drivers negotiate it, I just don't know. Luckily for us pedestrians they have an underground walkway that pops you up in the middle to see the Arc. From there we walked down Avenue des Champs-Élysées, one of the most famous roads in the world (and one of the most expensive). Here you would find rows of Parisian cafes and patisseries along with shops like Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Versace. Nothing quite like seeing a $100,000+ necklace in a shop window.
On to the Louvre with its beautiful square and gardens. The building itself was pretty breathtaking too. The pyramids look a little out of place but it is cool when you're inside the big one. The Louvre was enormous! I couldn't believe how big it was, you could spend days wondering it's corridors. We stuck to a couple of things we wanted to see; the Venus de Milo (gorgeous up close), The Winged Victory of Samothrace (I hadn't heard of this one before but it was beautiful!) and of course the Mona Lisa.
The Mona Lisa was very small, which plenty of people had told me before, and the crowds were huge which made it difficult to see it very well but it was a beautiful painting to view and the atmosphere is different to any other museum you'll encounter. I also loved the walls and ceilings of the Louvre which were often themselves painted with incredible images.
The Notre Dame Cathedral sits on an island in the middle of the Seine river and it was simply gorgeous. It had the most intricate carvings and towers and the inside was beautiful with it's columns, stained glass windows and hundreds of candles. I could have spent hours in there it was so pretty.
The next day Jodi and I headed for the Catacombs while Vania had some admin stuff to do. The Catacombs are an underground ossuary containing human bones from as far back as the 1700s that were moved there because of an overflow in Paris cemeteries and the diseases resulting from improper burials at the time. The bones were stacked in sections of an old underground quarry and many are arranged in patterns and have been open to the public since the early 19th century. It was one of the scariest places I've ever been. Thousands of skulls and bones, stacked in neat piles that went on forever! It really was a pretty creepy experience.
We met up with Vania in the afternoon to check out Moulin Rouge (sadly it was too expensive to see a show) and to enjoy some more samples of yummy Paris cafes, including raw mince (that was Vania, not me!).
Jodi was still waiting on her Interrail ticket which she had her flatmate courier to her (and was supposed to arrive in plenty of time.. but they lost it... Jodi was not having much luck on this trip), but Vania and I were keen to get out of Paris and accommodation was scarce so Vania & I went onto Tours (our next stop) while Jodi stayed in Paris. We had booked our train tickets and we were heading to the other side of Paris to the right station when things started to go wrong; our metro train broke down and we had to negotiate a different way, then the RER fast train was chocka and we couldn't get on, time was ticking by and we found ourselves bolting through stations Amazing Race style. We made it, just! I swear we had like 60sec to spare. I didn't know how many more things could possibly go wrong :)
2 comments:
Did you enjoy the French cuisine? I hope it was not too bad. :-)
Brings back some great memories of when I toured there with my rugby team in 88.
Hope you are well and having loads of fun.
Isa xxx.
Post a Comment