Paris has made itself to the top of my favourite places to visit so far. I found everything about it amazing; the people, the food, the architecture. The best part of the trip though was meeting up with our friends Alex and Bonnie from back home as they speak normal with no accent. We took a two hour Eurostar train from London to Paris which was a nice change from flying but for a good chunk of the ride was underground so you couldn’t really see much. The fact that Paris is only a 2 hour train ride away still boggles my mind as that is closer than driving to Calgary from Edmonton. Not as cheap but still closer.
One of the first oddities I noticed was that there was graffiti everywhere. If there was an open wall, there was graffiti. Even in places where you didn’t think people should be able to get to but it was there. All along the walls that follow the train tracks as well as in their metro stations underground between platforms there was graffiti on just about every inch of the wall. Ridiculous when you think about it but I think Paris embraces their graffiti culture as it wasn’t often painted over from what I can tell.
From the train station we exited from, we decided to walk to our hotel as it was a really beautiful day out. I’m not really sure exactly why we decided to walk but I think we thought it wasn’t actually that far but turned out to be about an hour or two walk away and we didn’t even actually make it to our hotel. We were getting pretty tired near the end and called a taxi from the road which drove us about 5 minutes away to our hotel. We were so close yet so far.
The hotel we stayed at was the Platine and it had a hollywood theme going on focused on Marylin Monroe.
After settling into our hotel, we took an hour nap before heading out to explore Paris. Our hotel was about a 20 minute walk from the Eiffel Tower and it was quite the sight to see. I never imagined the Eiffel Tower to be as big as it was. I thought it was smaller for some reason. It’s an amazing attraction to see.
The Arc de Triomphe was pretty cool but not as cool as the Eiffel Tower. We ended up not going to the top of it as we were feeling pretty cheap so we walked around the lower areas of it.
While stumbling around Paris, we found Moulin Rouge unintentionally. Not as exciting as I thought it was going to be.
The Notre Dame Cathedral also not as grande as I imagined. For some reason, I either imagine all these attractions to be bigger or smaller than they actually happen to be.
We found our way towards the Louvre and we saw that it didn’t even have that long of a line. I think it had about 30-50 at most and that would probably only take about a half-hour to an hour wait maybe and we still didn’t go inside. We took our pictures outside and moved along. I can’t say exactly why we decided to not go in but I am fine with just being around these attractions everybody in the world talks about.
Paris was beautiful and the food was so tasty after eating in London for so long. Everywhere we went to eat was delicious and I miss it dearly already. The people were extremely friendly even though we spoke with our horrible Canadian french, they never made rude comments or snuffed us on service. Everybody also said that the city had an odor but it didn’t smell like anything.
I’m glad we went and I will have fond memories of Paris.
Steven Aleong 