Au Paris

Going to try and catch up on a little travel blogging here, my friends…

While the WI Girls Take London adventures were no less debaucherous than expected - complete with missed tube stops, stolen champagne bottles, certain people defenestrated from cabs, and a lot of crawling over each other to get around my tiny flat - I will focus on the weekend visit to Paris.

That’s right, weekend, because you can do things like that when you live in London.

After booking the hostel at 11pm the night before (you’ll see why this is important in one second…), we got ourselves up and out, and hopped on the 9am Eurostar to Paris - I tried to book the 6:40 but was overruled - and we were in Paris by 12:30 local time. All Tonimarie wanted to do was see the Eiffel Tower and quote Sex and the City, but we kept her in suspense while we stayed below ground and navigated the Metro all the way to the Bastille Monument to find our 5-Star hostel. Naturally they greeted us with champagne, fresh baked cookies and chocolate covered strawberries at the door before showing us to our room. Not quite. The reality was we walked up the very narrow, very untidy, very uneven staircase to our closet/cupboard, and when I opened the door, I cannot tell you what I would have paid to have the girls’ faces on camera… Three twin beds, all in a line, touching so that it was like one big king bed, maybe 6 inches from the foot of the beds to the wall. Luckily, or so we thought, we had our own bathroom. Until we had our first experience with the showerhead on a string + no shower curtain…Yea, our showers, if you can call them that, didn’t go very well the next day on account of our lack in coordination of showerhead holding + soaping and washing capabilities. Welcome to Europe ladies!

Once we dropped our stuff and headed out I began them on one of my, now infamous, walking tours of European cities. Walking literally from one end of the city to the other, we hit up all the major tourist attractions with one goal in mind – get them to the tower (+ keep everyone fed and happy so no one wanted to bite each other’s head’s off). Notre Dame, the Seine bridges, the Louvre, the Louvre Courtyard (personal Harvard girls’ favorite! OUR courtyard), the Tuileries, Ab Harris’ favorite obelisk (fun fact Cailin taught me), the Musee d’Orsey, and finally…. I turned them down this side alley because I thought it was a shortcut, and low and behold, there she is. I thought they were going to cry. Surely the highlight of the trip!

After surveying the line for the elevators to the top, someone had the brilliant idea to walk up the stairs…

It really wasn’t that bad, and would actually recommend it for the strong at heart, plus after level two they put you in an elevator to the tippy top (Tone almost chickened out but we convinced her otherwise). We got our beautiful aerial view, sent a picture to our parents, and were ready to be on our merry way. Unfortunately for us, crowd control at the top was not really what we’re used to in America, so there was a bit of a commotion, I thought some guy was going to punch Kate out, and then cause a bit of a ruckus amongst the rest of the tour group who I thought were preparing for battle. We somehow made our escape and got back down to elevation zero - safe and sound. I won’t go into the details, but it was touch and go there for a little bit, and we definitely added to the anti-American sentiment in our accidental attempt to cut the entire line waiting for elevators down. Oops! Je ne parle pas français!

Moving on…we were absolutely beat at this point, but I made them trudge on to the Champs Elysees because I felt we had to get a drink at one of the cafes and see the Arc de Triomphe. It was about this time when we decided that for the whole week they had been in Europe, we never sat down without having in our hands an alcoholic beverage or something to stuff our faces with, but usually both, and it was pathetically amazing.

From there, instead of heading back to the Palace Resort & Spa and changing and going out for a night on the town I convinced them to stay out and that we would go to Sacre Coeur and eat at the top of the hill. Perhaps the only thing that rivals our Eiffel Tower experience is what I am about to tell you…the best Italian food I have ever had. Sorry North End Boston, sorry Little Italy New York, we found a little place off the beaten path in Montmartre. Lured in by an Italian family sitting at a table in the window, we came to find this place owned by a family from Brooklyn. BEST mussels in white wine sauce (yes, dad better than Carrabba’s!), best pasta dishes, best prosecco, and best service + limoncello at the end (re: see we never stopped eating and drinking every time we sat our fat asses down). As travel blogs go, this is probably completely useless because I don’t think any of us got a card or know the name or even where we were, so no way we can ever find this place again, but it will live on in our memories. Capped the night off by seeing the Eiffel Tower by night at the top of Sacre Coeur where all the locals seemed to be hanging out and drinking for the evening.

Day 2 was a lot of the same, and all was delicious and just as fabulous as the first day. Overall, Paris was très successful and I think the girls enjoyed themselves immensely.

Until another trip, Au Paris!! Still one of my favorite cities in the world.

Also fun fact - Kate had come across this in Italy, but apparently there is a widely known tradition to "lock your love" in Paris...while we did not bring our own industrial sized lock (although we probably should have seeing the state of our All-Inclusive Luxury Hotel) we were able to appreciate the beauty this tradition created! So cool!

French word of the day: nourritre et alcool = food and alcohol, what got us through our visit. We went on a nourritre et alcool tour of Pareeeeee!