I heart Paris.

Where to begin? I don’t know how the best way to go about telling you how it all went down, so I’ll just begin. I am not going to do it justice by trying to write every single thing, but bear with me. Oh and I accidently posted my pics in the oppoisite order. I’ve been struggling with the blog thing the past few days! Sorry if it gets really long too…

Thursday night / Friday morning we wake up at 3 am to catch our bus at 3:40 that takes us to the train station. On the bus twice two drunk boys in the bus ahead of us moon us. Nice. Next we get to the station, onto the Chunnel, and off we go! For those of you who don’t know, the Chunnel is a train that goes underneath the English Channel…So there’s a lot of ear popping and sleeping going on.

We arrive in Paris around 9 am and we all seem to forget that they don’t speak English here. After getting some money out of the ATM, Paige goes up to one of the workers and asks, “Excuse me? Where’s the toilette?” The worker looks at her and says, “Bonjour!” It was pretty funny and we enjoyed our first experience with a Frenchman. We finally found the bathrooms and had to cough up 75 cents to use them. I find the whole paying for the bathroom thing kind of annoying, but oh well.

Of course right as we turn the corner out of the train station, I see this little café called Café Benjamin. What are the odds? I know you all think I have this obsession with finding Ben/Benji/Benjamin stuff, but I REALLY don’t. It’s just EVERYWHERE!! Hahaha I think it’s actually really funny. The best part about it is right after I take this picture we decided to go back to the train station and get a metro pass from there…It was mean to be. ;)

STUCK ON THE EIFFEL TOWER?!?

French boys!

Boat Tour

A couple of my girls: Ash & Kaylee

Presh!

Swirly stairs of the Arc de Triomphe!

We love our scarves

We're so cool!

Ah, Paris!

All of us and the Arc de Triomphe!

The Sacre Coeure

Best strawberries on the planet!

YSA night!

The Seine

Creepy toilettes...

Quasi's bell

Top of Notre Dame

Ah, me and Annie!

We get our tickets and decide to start out by the Louvre because there’s a lot to do by it. So we take our pics and head to the San Chapelle and Notre Dame. We walk along the Seine River and eventually make it to San Chapelle. The San Chapelle is a very old and neat cathedral with breathtaking stained glass windows. After hanging out in there for a while we head over a few blocks to Notre Dame. Annie was in Paris in October so she remembered where the best crepe place in Paris is and luckily it’s right by the Notre Dame because by this time we are CRAVING crepes! I get a ham & cheese one since I’m running on empty food wise and the taste is indescribable. It was absolutely the BEST thing I have eaten in over a month. We eat those and head inside the Notre Dame. **Side note for Jessica. Remember when we were at the Notre Dame and you totally tripped over one of those cement slabs?! Hahah well I took this picture just for you…

The inside of Notre Dame is a lot like all the other cathedrals I have seen, but the giant circular windows is what are amazing. Next we take a bathroom break at these sketchy-telephone-booth-looking things. But hey when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Now we head back over to hike the four hundred something stairs to the top. As we climb the stairs we chant, “Crepes! Crepes! Crepes!” – For motivation, of course. This is the part that I love….Looking over Paris from up above. It is magical. I feel like Quasimodo as I walk around the roof and hang out with the gargoyles and the bell. We take lots of pictures and head back down the spiral staircase.

San Chapelle

We now decide to go to the catacombs, or so we thought. It’s actually just the crypts below Notre Dame. It was still cool to see, but we paid 2 Euro to see the catacombs! Oh well, it’s nice to sit down for a minute away from the bitter French air. We now call these crypts the “fake catacombs”. Our game plan now is to go to the Eiffel Tower and go to the top. We get there and it’s closed. You can only go up to the first part, but not all the way to the top. I’m pretty sure it’s because of the wind, but who knows. So we decide to wait and do tomorrow. The big question now is what are we going to do for dinner? We basically just wander around, get baguettes and cheese, and head back to the Eiffel Tower.

At this point in time, Carly had been talking to a girl who went to high school with us, Allison Brown, who is in Paris on her study abroad. She told us about a YSA activity tonight and she invited us to come. So we meet her and a couple other girls and we hop on the metro to their church/school/institute. It’s completely different than it is here. I enjoyed it though. It’s all in French, but I’m 99% positive they’re talking about crepes. Perfect. It is funny for us to attempt and sing the hymn in French, so we basically all slaughter it. Glad they’re LDS and don’t get offended by dumb Americans who don’t know their language. After the presentation on crepes we, of course, have more crepes! For being pre-made, they’re dang good! We say our goodbyes and thank yous and head to the metro station. This is where our little group of nine splits up. Carly, Kaylee, Sharon, and I are going to a hostel and Elise, Paige, Annie, Ashley, and Kinsey head to their hotel. Our hostel is great. Just what you expect a hostel to be like: a little crusty, with weird young adults everywhere, and the smell of alcohol. It’s great. We check in and head straight to our room. They gave us a bag of sheets that we put on our bunk beds. There’s a scary blanket already on the bed that looks like it’s never been washed, but I only use it to keep my feet warm. There’s no hand soap in the bathroom so luckily Sharon brought some hand sanitizer. I am so physically tired from being awake for 20 hours straight I can’t think about how gross this place really is. I change into my pj’s and lay my head on the pillow and immediately fall asleep.

Saturday morning I wake up to Kaylee being TOTALLY ready to go. She’s dressed with her shoes on and just ready. We wake up Carly and Sharon and head down to our continental breakfast. We have cereal, croissants, and orange juice. It’s pretty good for hostel food! Get back up to our room and Carly gets a phone call from Paige on her phone. We were planning on meeting the other girls at ten outside the metro stop by our hostel. Paige tells Carly about how they had a very bad night. I guess they got to their hotel and had a bad feeling about it (it really did sound sketchy). So they prayed and decided they needed to go to another hotel. We decide to meet them under the Arc de Triomphe at noon so they can have some extra sleeping time since they had a rough night. We decide to get some things done while waiting to meet up with them. Walk outside our hostel and there it is - the Sacre Coeur! After hiking those stairs, going inside the cathedral, and seeing hundreds of Scottish men in kilts, we make our way down the hill. We find the street that Carly and her mom stayed on when they last came to Paris, and we search for the crepe place close to their hotel! This time I got a nutella and banana crepe…Why do French crepes get better and better each time you have one!? I don’t know, but I was loving it.

We are enjoying our crepes too much when we realize it’s 11:30 and we have to get across town in a half hour. Luckily we make it right on time to meet up with our girls to get pics in front of the Arc de Triomphe. Only a few of us decided to actually hike the Arc, but when get to the top we go crazy with our photo ops! Kaylee and I ask these two French guys to take a picture of us and the one insisted on being IN the picture with us.

Next up we decide to go and do a boat tour on the Seine. It’s fun seeing a lot of things without actually having to walk there. We mostly enjoy just sitting and chatting in Paris. It’s the best! There’s some Scottish thing going on here this weekend so the Scottish men in kilts are everywhere! You know how people say Scottish men don’t wear anything under their kilts?? Well they’re right. We get mooned (AGAIN!!!) by 2 old Scottish men who are standing on a bridge as we pass underneath. I never want to see that again.

After the boat tour, we head back to the Eiffel Tower to see if it’s open and it is! We lucked out! We immediately get in line and head up. We do the normal get off on the first level, walk around, and get on the elevator again to go to the top. It is FREEZING. The wind is blowing nonstop and the only way to get warm is to squeeze in with the hundreds of people in the elevators. At the top, we begin our new photo op and me and Kaylee decide to ask two French men to get in a picture with us. Fun! Now the best part of the day happens…Kaylee, Elise, Paige, and I get into the elevator. We’re going down nice and slow when the elevator just stops. It seems fine and dandy until we realize we’ve been stuck for about 2 minutes. Paige finally asks the elevator guy how often this usually happens and he says, “Oh, probably once a year for about a minute.” Hahaha we are laughing so hard because we’re trying not to freak out, let alone freak out the other 15 people in the elevator with us too. We eventually get down and are giddy to tell the other girls about this awesome thing we were just a part of!

All we have time for now are more crepes and shopping for souvenirs. We get those two things in (I got a butter and sugar crepe…Yum!) and head to the Chunnel. It’s been a long 48 hours with more than 1,000 steps and I’m ready for home. Yes, London is my home. I love it. Do I have to leave it in 2 months??

Hope this wasn’t too long or boring to read!! For more detailed descriptions on Paris, read Ashley’s blog (“Living in London”), Carly’s, or any of the other blogs that are linked to mine that involve London. You’d get a kick out of all our different sides of the stories. Mine is pretty boring. I’m sorry for all of you who read this.

I love you and miss you all!!

- Liz

P.S. I'm SO sorry if this was too confusing to read! It just feels good for me to actually have it posted!