Day 41

Friday, June 22 -

All I have to say about the Megabus is that it definitely saved a lot of money. We left London around 9 p.m, so I pretty much slept the whole time. Or tried to sleep. Sleeping on a bus just isn't really comfortable. I finally fell asleep while waiting a million years to board the ferry to cross the English Channel. They made us get off the bus though, so that didn't last long. People driving cars got to board first, so all the nice, comfortable couches were taken by the time we got on. It was stormy out, so the ride was really rough. I don't normally get motion sickness, but it might as well have been a roller coaster ride, and every 5 minutes it felt like we crashed into something and the whole boat would vibrate. AND the floor we were on was filled with screaming children. Despite all that, I managed to fall fast asleep on the floor. We got to the other side of the channel and boarded the bus, and by this time the sun was coming up, and I slept again until we finally arrived in Paris!

We're all professional city navigators now, and we made it all the way to hostel (and all around the city) with no problems. We couldn't check in until later that evening, so we dumped our stuff and hit the town!

A cafe in the street that looks like the one in Inception!

The first stop was, of course, the Eiffel Tower. We took the stairs all the way to the second floor, which was quite the hike, and then took the elevator all the way up to the top! It was much cheaper than I thought it would be, and the view and the tower were so beautiful!

The Eiffel Tower!

The view from the first floor

Looking down the center of the tower

The view from the second floor

The view from the second floor

The view from the second floor. The Arc de Triomphe is toward the top on the left.

The view from the top

The view from the top

Next stop was the Arc de Triomphe! It was much bigger than I thought it would be, and like the Eiffel Tower, it was pretty impressive. Before we got there, we stumbled upon a food vendor and I got a banana and nutella crepe.

Eating a crepe in France!

The Arc de Triomphe

The eternal flame

Inside the Arc

Pretty much every where we went we would spend a good 20 minutes doing a photo rotation so each person got several pictures in front of everything. We're the ultimate tourists. After this we headed off to the Louvre. It's free Friday nights for students so we didn't even have to pay! They treat their youth very well in France, and we got student discounts for almost everything.

The pyramid inside the Louvre

The Mona Lisa

The crowd around the Mona Lisa. It wasn't as bad as we expected!

Outside of the Louvre

Outside of the Louvre, and pretty much by all the main tourist attractions, were these guys selling little Eiffel Tower statues. There were probably about 50 of them outside the Louvre and they would just come up to you and try to sell you these stupid little towers. It was so annoying, and I just wanted to be like, 'I just told your friend who is standing two feet from you that I didn't want one, but now that I've walked a few steps I think I changed my mind and I'll buy one from you.' But I didn't. They'd probably kill me.

The sun beginning to set over the Seine

The sun setting over the Eiffel Tower

While watching the sunset by the Eiffel Tower, French cops began to gather EVERYWHERE. There were as many cops around as there were dudes selling little Eiffel Towers. The police kept going up to people who were just sitting on the grass and asking them questions and going through their stuff. There was some guy who was sleeping next to us, and he looked weird but he didn't really look like he was homeless. The cops woke him up and he told them in English that he didn't speak French, but he didn't sound like he really spoke English either, and the cops just start going through his bag of stuff. They didn't find anything so they said sorry and walked away. The cops kept doing it to people, and it was so weird! Especially because there were SO many of them all over the place.

Once it started to get dark we left and went to our hostel. It was my very first time ever staying in a hostel and it was super nice! I judge things on a scale of Hotel Belmont in Brussels to awesome. Since Hotel Belmont is pretty much as low as you can get, I think everything else automatically becomes fives times better. But still, this hostel wasn't in a super sketchy area and it was clean. I would recommend it to anyone going to Paris.

The Loft Hostel

Our room

The other part of our room