Hello again!

So I am going to pick up where I left off with the food festival blog. The morning after the closing ceremonies (Monday) I took a train to Paris (about 4.5 hours). I was originally going to take the train from Torino (where the festival was) but I found out Bardonecchia (where the hotel was) was about an hour closer to paris so I just hopped on there! The train was pretty nice and the ride went well. For the rest of the week I traveled with one of my roommates Kim. We arrived in Paris around 3:15 and used the metro to get to our hostel. The metro is the subway in Paris. It is huge and has 14 lines (compare that to Boston which only has about 5!). The metro system is cheap, quick, and can get you anywhere. The best part is it was very easy to figure out so we arrived to our hostel in Paris around 4. In case anyone doesn't know a hostel is basically a hotel but much cheaper and usually you share a room with other people. We were supposed to be in a room with 4 people total. When we got there they told us we were upgraded for free to a double meaning we got our own room and we actually got out own bathroom too! Plus free towels (very rare in hostels). Very lucky!

The night it was rainy and we were pretty tired from traveling so we grabbed some dinner planned out the next few days and got to bed early. Tuesday we woke up very early and went to Notre Dame Cathedral. It was absolutely gorgeous and free to get in, bonus! It had unbelievable stained glass windows on all sides and the architecture was really pretty. After the Cathedral we headed over to a tour we decided to do. It was a walking tour we found in a brochure that was actually free! The company provides free walking tours and you can tip as little or as much as you want at the end. The tour guides are often students or just enjoy history/the city they live in. My tour guide was a European history major and now lives in Paris. He loves the history of Paris plus it's a great chance for him to get to speak English which is why he does it. Plus I think they might even make more with tips than with a regular tour company!

The tour was about 4 hours, which for me is usually a bit too long because #1 I'm not always all that interested in history and #2 that's a long time to be on your feet! But it turned out to be great! Whenever there is a chance the tour guide has us sit down while he talked. Also we got a 30 minute lunch break at a little sandwich shop they showed us. It was great food and a good break to rest my feet. I got to see almost everything major in Paris and he was funny. He made it really interesting and entertaining. We saw the louvre, Eiffel tower, the arch de triumph, a few really pretty parks, notre dame, several historical bridges and many other historical buildings (check out my pictures for everything!)

After the tour we walked around a bit more and then at night we climbed the Eiffel tower. Because of some special elections going on it was actually blue at night! Also every hour after sunset it sparkles and lights up with white lights. It was so pretty. We decided to climb the stairs half way (610 stairs!) and take the elevator the rest of the way up. It was a gorgeous view from the top! I loved seeing the city at night. After the Eiffel tower we headed back to the hostel because we were exhausted! We left the hostel at 8am and got back at 10:30pm so a long day but we did so much!

The next day (Wednesday) we went shopping for a few hours. In Europe stores tend to open whenever they feel like it-maybe 10, 10:30 even 11 so we took our time in the morning since we couldn't do much if stuff was closed. After shopping we checked out the Eiffel tower during the day. We didn't climb it again but just went to see it. We also went to the arch de triumph which was cool. Wednesday night we went to the Louvre, the famous museum that has the Mona Lisa and tons of other artwork. It is actually huge so we probably only saw 1/10th of it all. After the museum we wanted to go on a river boat cruise of the city at night. We actually got a little lost trying to find our way out of the louvre (it is 35,000 pieces of art) so we didn't know if we were going to make it. We had to sprint from the metro station to the boat but luckily we made it exactly at 10. It left 1 minute later so good thing we ran! It was a really pretty way to see the city.

After the boat tour we wanted to go stop at Moulin Rouge at night but we were so tired we went back to the hotel. Plus Paris was much colder than we thought so we didn't really bring warm clothes. We were pretty chilly by the end of the boat tour and just wanted to be in some heat! The whole trip we had to layer quite a bit because it was probably about 10-20 degrees colder than Italy..

Overall I loved Paris. It is the most beautiful city I have seen at night and still during the day it is obviously gorgeous too. I didn't think the food was so great but everything else was wonderful and for my first stay in a hostel it went pretty well! There are lots of hostel horror stories so I'm glad we picked a good one! So that is my news from Paris..next is Ireland!