PARIS! day one

This weekend I went to Paris with my friends Kali and Hannah. (have I mentioned Hannah? she goes to Queen Mary but studied abroad at Miami last year). Anyway we got up bright and early to catch out train over there. 

our hostel

The first day we decided to walk around. So first we went to Notre Dame. While we were here we did get semi attacked by these two women who were pretending to be deaf and mute to try to scam money from people. How do we know they were scamming? When I told one that I didn't speak French, she answered "Oh, that's fine, I know English!" and later when Kali and Hannah said no to them, this same lady told them "F*ck you!". While there were a lot of beggars and people trying to sell things, as long as you told them "NO" and kept walking, they usually didn't press you. These two however, were straight up rude. 

 We then proceeded to walk towards the Louvre. Along the way we got crepes (so good!) and stopped to take a few pictures.

 This bridge is called Ponte des Arts. Its really cool, people put locks on it and throw away the key into the river to symbolize their everlasting devotion and whatnot. There were some really cool locks that people had decorated. But there were also locks that opened with a combination instead of a key. Clearly some people in the City of Love are keeping their options open.

 At the Louvre, we messed around for a while and probably confused a lot of people who didn't speak English by all taking our pictures so it looked like the water was coming out of our mouths. Classy no? We then walked through the park behind it, past a carnival they had set up, Cleopatra's needle, and along the Avenue des Champs-Elysees.

 loved this fountain.

After walking up that one street we arrived at the Arc  De Triomphe. At this point we had walked across Paris more or less, so we took the metro back to our hostel.

  We got dinner at a little restaurant near the hostel and I tried snails! They were actually really tasty. There was a 3 course deal, so we all got 3 different courses and shared them, so in that meal I tried the snails, french onion soup, goat cheese salad, mussels, duck confit, creme brulee, chocolate mousse and peach tart. So French!

The view from our window, we were on the very top floor! It was quite the stair climb. The stairs were so narrow a spiral that I always got dizzy climbing up or down them.

Our loverly room. We shared a 10 people room, all the other people in it were very nice, although the walls were paper thin. 

Besides the fact that Hannah is one of my best friends, I was very glad that she was in Paris with us. Kali is in a beginner French class now, and all I know how to say it "thank you", "hello", and "I don't know". We would have been totally lost without her. (She took French throughout school, so she is semi-fluent. Girl also knows Arabic. Tri-lingual! How cool is that?)