I happily agreed to go to Paris with such cheap accommodation. We left Lausanne at 4:30AM on Friday morning, the 19th and arrived in Paris (after going through Geneva) at 9:03AM. This was a pretty short trip compared to other times and after departing from the train station we headed towards the Louvre.
The Louvre is arguably the best museum in the world. It is a former palace and is gigantic in size; it holds over 30,000 works of art! It only cost 9 Euro to go in which was really nice and we were able to store our jackets and backpacks.
After seeing tons and tons of art, including cool things such as the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, I was arted out. From there we headed to our hotel, Hotel des Capucines. It took us quite a long time to find it and when we did we had 3 go up to the room and 2 stay down in the lobby (it was a 3 person room and we were going to have the other 2 as "guests" :) but that didn't work because it is a small hotel and the lady at the front desk, who was not the nicest person in the world, noticed our plan and foiled it.Rob and I, the last two asked to go on this trip with our friends Joe, Brooks and Sam, decided to find another place to stay. We tried hostels, anyone we knew in Paris or anyones friends, CouchSurfing, and nothing.
Eventually, after an eveing of wandering around Paris and seeing the Arc, the Eiffel Tower and much more we stumbled upon a hotel with a decent rate for a double. We checked in just after midnight and slept until 10:30 the next morning - it was a blessing.Saturday we road the RER out to Versailles to see if we could just do the gardens. The bad thing was we had our backpacks and no where to put them. In order to store your luggage at Versailles you have to be touring the whole complex because you store them in the Castle area. Regardless, we pretty much went out there for nothing, but since I am going back to Versailles on October 3, I wanted to know in advance how to get there.
While leaving Versailles, we ran into Joe, Brooks and Sam who had just enjoyed seeing everything there. Rob and I were extremely tired and just ready to go home and sleep in our own beds. We decided to take the train a little further in order to be closer to Gare de Lyon, our train station. There, we spoke with a woman at the reservations desk and she was so nice. She changed our reservations from Sunday morning to Saturday evening! We had our tickets home and it was great to board the train and get back early. Like I said, I am going back to Paris again very soon - I love that city, and I know that it will be a more enjoyable experience. I am going to do Paris right this time. Thankfully, I blessed to have the opportunity to go to Paris twice within two weeks. God is good.
I know I'm behind and I will try to blog about this past weekend ASAP, but I have a French quiz tomorrow that I need to study for and dinner and bible study. I hope you all are doing well! God bless,
Wade
