July 13th: Arriving in Paris!

Monday July 13th:
Monday morning we woke up in our mobile sardine can (the train bunks) in Paris! A bus took us and our luggage (thank heavens for not having to haul it through town) to our hotel. Our hotel room is quite nice, with one major exception…we have no shower door or curtain…it’s gone. So, when we shower, we have to try to aim the water away from the rest of the bathroom, and we still end up with a pool of water outside the tub. It’s pretty awesome. But…there are no holes in the wall, and there are three mirrors…whoot whoot!! I’m not quite sure if we’re moving up or down in the world…but we’re moving somewhere. We took a few minutes to change out of our train clothes and then headed down to the lobby to meet Darrin for our first Parisian adventure, which consisted of walking to the Eiffel Tower and sketching it multiple times (which, by the way I did not accomplish very well). But what better introduction to Paris can you ask for than walking up to the Eiffel Tower? It was great. We then had a few hours to ourselves to do some stuff around the city. A few of us girls tried to go to the Catacombs, but because it was the day before Bastille Day (France’s national holiday), they were closed…but, of course, we didn’t find that out until AFTER we had walked for an hour and a half to get there. It was pretty annoying. By that time, we only had a couple hours left, so we just decided to skip the tourism and go to Hard Rock Café. It was a fun experience, but not so impressed with the food. I just got a hamburger and fries, but apparently the normal way to eat meat here is very rare, so even though I ordered my meat well done, it was still pink, which was really hard for me to choke down…but I was hungry so I did. Oh well, can’t have the best all the time.
After the Hard Rock, we went back to the hotel to meet the rest of the group for our nighttime boat tour of Paris (sounds great doesn’t it). On the way to the boat dock, we walked by Notre Dame and took a bunch of pictures outside. We did jumping pictures off of the wall in front of the lawn, and when I landed I fell forward a bit, landing on my hands and knees (softly, it didn’t hurt), and then Kylee rolled over me…it was pretty hilarious. We did some group shots and single shots, and just hung out for a while before we started our tour. When we got to the Seine river, we realized that we had lost Nancy, so Darrin and Caroline went back to look for her. Meanwhile, Susie bought tour tickets for us, but we bought tickets for the 10:30 pm ride (we got there about 9:40) so that the others would have time to get back before we got on. We never found Nancy (until we got back to the hotel), so we just got on our 10:30 tour anyway. It was amazing. The boat had stadium type seats with open sides and tops. We had a bilingual tour guide that explained the sites along the way, which looked so incredible at night since they were all lit up. I was surprised to find that some of the most famous architectural features in Paris are bridges rather than buildings. We went under the oldest bridge in Paris, the bridge that was a gift from Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and a bridge that has collapsed more than 10 times. We also passed the Louvre, a bunch of churches, the building where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned for the last days of her life, and, of course, the Eiffel Tower. It was a unique and enjoyable way to get oriented with Paris. We didn’t get back to the hotel until after midnight, so we pretty much just crashed in the hotel. It was a fantastic first day in Paris!!!