Passport to Paris

Day 11 

We got up pretty early, finished packing, and headed next door for a real English breakfast (we talked to the bed and breakfast the night before and convinced them to let us have it). We both got eggs with bacon and toast...delicious! 

We had a little time to kill before heading to the train, so we hung out in the room and relaxed. Finally we picked up some food for lunch on the train and ventured on our next excursion getting to our Eurostar.   We had to take the metro to a different stop and then transfer to our train. The biggest problem was how to get our luggage to the train. We only had one choice, lug it down the stairs.  It was quiet the scene, but we did it. It took us no time at all to get to our Eurostar. 

We hung out until they told us we could check in. From there we had to put all of our belongings through an x-ray machine.  Jill got through right away, I was another question.  Apparently the X-ray machine showed something suspicious in my bag.  I watched as they searched the lady in front of me first, turns out she didn't realize you aren't allowed to bring a large knife on the train with you. They asked if they could check my bag next and of course I agreed. The security guard pulled EVERYTHING out of my bag. The only two things he questioned were my newly bought menorah and my epipen. Once I explained what both items were he put all my stuff through the machine and said I was free to go. 

Jill and I waited a little longer until they called our train. We boarded the train, found out seats (which weren't next to each other) and headed for Paris. The two hour train ride was easy.  Jill slept and read while I watched a movie and people watched around me. 

We finally arrived in Paris. We bought a 5 day metro pass and followed the directions we were given. This included lugging our luggage both up and down stairs and switching metros. This was fine for us, we were pros as directions!  We made it to Jill's friend Genevieve's  place easily. We waiting for her to let us in and dragged our luggage up 3 flights of stairs. 

We settled in, went grocery shopping, and started our night. Gen suggested we go to the Eiffel Tower and see it light up as sparkle at night. This sounded perfect to us!  We headed over that way. The sight of the Eiffel Tower was amazing! We found a seat and waited. We then realized we had a few hours, so we ventured around Paris. We walked toward the water, bought a pastry, and bought a bottle of wine to drink at the Eiffel Tower. 

We headed back and waited.  One thing they have at the tower is people selling wine, beer, champagne, and cigarettes. Not only are they selling them, they won't leave anyone alone. It's quiet annoying.  At one point a man selling came very close to us, mumbled something, dropped all his merchandise, and left. As you can imagine, we were very confused and had no idea what was going on. It turns out it's not legal for them to sell this stuff at the Eiffel Tower and the police were looking for them. We saw one officer pull a bag out of a bush. He biked over to the sellers and asked them to leave. They did, but then came back once the police had left. By 10:30 we were very cold and confused at why the Eiffel Tower wasn't sparkling. We assumed it must have been because the workers were on strike.  We headed home and called it a night. 

Day 12 

We are excited to announce that today was the first day we actually made it to our scheduled
 walking tour. Yes, it is day 12 of our trip and we are just now making a tour. On our way we stopped at the most delicious bakery where we both got a pastry to eat on our way. 

Our tour guide Billy was the best tour guide we could have hoped for. He was very knowledgable about the city and had tons of corky facts to tell us. We saw Norte Dame, the Love Bridge, the Louvre and many other famous spots. Billy even took us to the original Facebook, which is a bridge where a ruler had all of his friends faces carved out of stone. We talked about how the Eiffel Tower was on strike and how they didn't have a light show the night before but some of the other tourist on the tour told us it did in fact happen just at 11:00 which was about a half hour after we left. 

We had previously bought tickets to the Eiffel Tower but we were unable to use them because they were still on strike, so we instead finished the tour and walked the Champs Elysees to the Arch De Triumph before catching the metro home. We got back to Gen's apartment, had lunch and waited for her to come back from class. Once Gen arrived and we left to go to the Moulin Rouge, we didn't go inside but sat outside and ate more pastries. We then traveled up to the highest spot in Paris where we had an amazing view over the city. We saw some street performers and other street vendors when we were approached by a group of men trying to sell us string that they were tying on our wrists. When we told them we didn't want any they had pretty much the same response "little girl, be happy". We stopped to ask a girl to take a photo of us, she agreed and then asked if she could take one of the three of us on her camera for a souvenir, extremely confused we agreed. 

Afterwards we were getting hangry so we decided to go to dinner. Gen took us to a very nice vegetarian restaurant. The waiter fancied Gen and added extra fruit to her dessert (we know this because he told her he gave them to her because she was very pretty). When we got our bill there was a note on the back "fancy a drink after work?". 

Next Gen took us to the largest English bookstore in Europe called Shakespeare and co. It was really cool to see all of the books, we were even told that Ernest Hemingway worked there. 

It was getting late so we decided to stop at a local restaurant, have a drink and people watch. After about 30 mins nothing really happened so we left to go back to the Eiffel Tower. We wanted to see the sparkly lights that we missed the night before. This time we got there at the correct time 11:00 and were able to grab a seat just as the light show started. It was amazing to see. We then headed home to prepare for day 13.