Paris!

 Note: From an email to a friend, July 20


Just got back from Paris: it was absolutely amazing!!! I loved it. And I made three new friends, international students who are studying English in Cambridge this summer: one from Brazil, one from Macao and one from Taiwan. Hung out with them a lot, had a blast… we're supposed to be getting lunch together later this week.

But yeah, Paris...my hotel was incompetent and gave us two occupied hotel rooms before finally checking us into an empty room, so the Brazilian girl and I missed the bus when it left for our first sightseeing tour!!! We were furious/confused/disappointed, and the tour guide didn't have his cell phone on so we couldn't get in contact with the group, and I was mad and freaked out because I didn't know French and felt like I would miss out on seeing the city, so I went back up to the room and started crying, lol. My Brazilian friend came up and patted me on the shoulder and told me it would be ok, we could figure it out on our own. In broken English, she assured me, "we're not babies...we can do it by ourselves." :-) The group was doing a bit of sightseeing downtown in the coach, and then doing a river tour on the seine, so we figured we could at least do the river tour. So the incompetent but nice hotel girl told us we could take the tube to Chatelet and go to Pont Neuf for the boats, so we did that, and got there without incident. (I like the tubes in Paris better than in London...maybe because I had simple directions, lol).

I absolutely loved being on the river, which is funny for someone who doesn't like water. It was raining on and off that day, and surprisingly cool. After the boat tour, we walked up the street parallel to the river, on the opposite side from the Louvre and Notre dame, and we walked all the way from down there to the Eiffel Tower!!! We knew it wasn't close, and we were enjoying the sights while walking and didn't want to take the tube…but we didn't realize just how far it was!
When we finally reached the tower, it was just breathtaking. It was just getting dark, so they had the lights turned on. When I first got into Paris, I was amazed at how beautiful the city was and how unremarkable/ugly the Eiffel looked in contrast…a huge metal thing, like something a guy would design. Lol. But up close, it was totally different. And the drizzle and wind made it more dramatic, quite a surreal experience.

Unfortunately, we couldn't go inside it because of the weather, so we took the subway back to Bercy, where our hotel was, and found a little sandwich/pizza shop for dinner. I felt silly when ordering because I couldn't say 'pepperoni' in French, and the guy thought I wanted a brownie. I ended up just getting a ham pizza, and I got a brownie, too, because it looked good. Then we were pooped and went to bed.

...Ooh, I forgot some stuff…on the way to Paris, we left at 4 a.m. (!!!), and drove there on a coach, and so we took the ferry from Dover in the UK to Calais in France. Cliffs of Dover are very pretty. And I LOVED being on the ferry! It was so cool!!! It was my first time being out on an open sea (granted, the English Channel isn't that big, but it's bigger than the lakes and rivers I’ve been on). I liked being on deck, watching the cliffs get tiny in the background. We took the SeaFrance ferry, so everything was in French, although most stuff had the English in small print underneath, and I was taken aback by how much it bothered me that everything was not in English and that I couldn't understand some of it. Not that I dwelled on it or anything, but it was just really weird...unsettling is the best word that comes to mind. Maybe that's why I cried when we missed the coach later that day...I wouldn't have cared if we were in London, but something about not being able to read made me skittish at first. But anyway, we ended up having a lovely day and appreciated the fact that we weren't with the group because we could do what we wanted at our own pace. So it worked out well.

On the next day, Saturday, we went to Montmartre and saw Moulin Rouge and the big church on the hill (Sacre Coeur) and a bunch of sex shops. Then we went back downtown and had a free hour, supposedly to see Notre Dame, but it was so touristy and crowded that most of us just wandered the streets, which were also touristy and crowded. I got some nice cheap souvenirs for my little sisters. I really missed them all weekend, kept thinking about how lucky I was to be there and how I wished they were with me.

Anyway, after that, we went to the palace at Versailles. Stunning! Absolutely amazingly beautiful. By the time we got back to the hotel, we had just enough energy to slink over across the street to get food and then went to bed early. We watched a little "who wants to be a millionaire" in French first though. It was funny because I could understand the questions written on the screen but couldn't understand a word they were saying. They just sound like they were about to throw up at any moment… everything sounds like, "le bleuggghh." haha. I know "merci" is thank you, but whenever anybody said anything to me on the streets, especially in stores, I’d always forget even that one word and just smile dumbly.

My three new friends were very excited that I was a native English speaker and asked me all kinds of questions. And they were excited that I was American, because they said my accent was easier to understand than the British one. By the second day, I was talking a bit more slowly and using simpler sentences than usual because I'd been hanging with the girls so much. You know how sometimes when you're around people who speak differently, you start to pick it up? Well I picked up broken English! haha. One guy even asked me, "are you learning English too?" lol. It was really funny. ...I also met two American law students, rising 2Ls, who were studying in Cambridge. One was studying at Nebraska, and he was very nice, and the other was from Chattanooga and at Mercer Law in Georgia, which excited me at first. But then he talked the ENTIRE way there and back, while saying absolutely nothing at all! :-) I felt so sorry for the Nebraska guy. It was quite funny, and fun to watch the two law students interact all weekend. They were like an odd couple, with the Nebraska kid being bigger but quieter, like a henpecked husband. lol.

This morning we went to the Louvre. It was stunning as well. I saw the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo statue, this sphinx-looking Egyptian tomb thing (I sound so intelligent, I know, lol), and Hammurabi’s Code. There was so much that we couldn't see it all, but we did a pretty good job of covering what we could. I enjoyed it a lot.

Then we headed home, leaving Paris at about 1 p.m. and getting to Cambridge at about 11:30 p.m. Needless to say, I'm very tired, but I had the most amazing weekend ever. The girls and I bonded so well, which made it even more fun. Paris is so interesting that I would love to go back. The only weird thing was that the beggars and street people were very forceful. Everywhere I went, men were trying to make me buy these little Eiffel Tower key chains. And there were even some that tried to tie these little strings around your wrists and then make you pay for them. Creative, but weird. Lol.

But yeah, it's 1 a.m. and I have class tomorrow, so I should be getting to bed. More later.