A Happy Paris-Shaped Blur

Well.  Peter Pan Escapism Eurotrip is officially a week and a half done.  Backpacking is happening, some times more happily than others.

In line to check in at Dulles

I've been having a blast with my sister, laughing our heads off and making one travel mistake after another!  Yesterday we learned in the most inconvenient way possible that Lyon has not one but two train stations.  And just tonight, we learned that it is a really, really good idea to check the prices of trains (not to mention duration of the ride) to the town you want to visit before you book your hostel there.  So we will be taking a four-hour, two-layover train ride from Lyon to Chamonix tomorrow, which is a walk in the park compared to the nine-hour (and bloody expensive) train ride we will soon be taking from Chamonix to Nice.  I am really excited about seeing the Alps, especially the mighty Mont Blanc.  It will be great to get away from the city vibe and do some hiking.  Eve wants to ride horses too. :)  So no doubt that it will be worth it.  We will just have to be very... patient with each other as we try to figure out all the steps of our long travel day.  Nothing if not a learning experience, and an entry for the travel books.

Our week in Paris was one giant, happy, hectic, chaotic blur.  Paris is an amazing, ridiculous city.  Thank goodness for their Metro.  We stayed at Woodstock Hostel in Montmartre, and they were great.  Any accommodation in Paris is going to be freaking expensive and this was no exception, but both the staff and the clientele were very friendly and fun.  We had several good nights out in the hostel's courtyard, making new friends over 2-euro bottles of wine.  When a fellow hostel-stayer and I began boasting about our champagne-opening skills, it was decided that we should have a contest.  I won (natch!) with a foil-to-pop opening time of 11.5 seconds.  Never doubt the skills of a master.

My Challenger and I

Impromptu accordion concert in the common room.

But we seriously did a lot more in Paris than hang out in the hostel and drink wine.  In fact, we did so much that there's no way I can tell you everything in any kind of detail, and anyway you can probably guess how most of it went.  But there are two Paris investments that I have to highly recommend you make should you ever find yourself in this city.  The first is a sort of all-access metro pass.  It's expensive, but we used the metro a ton, and this pass made it so easy, rather than having to constantly replenish and keep track of a book of tickets.  The only bad thing is that the pass goes from Sunday to Sunday, so if you visit mid-week to mid-week (like we did), you lose some days on the value.  But it was still worth it as far as I'm concerned.  The second is the Paris Museum Pass.  Again, expensive, but 100% worth it.  We bought the 4-day pass for 54 Euros.  It lets you into over 60 Paris attractions for free, but best of all -- you get to skip all the ticket lines!!!  We visited the Louvre and were one of the first people down the hall to see the Mona Lisa.  I actually got right up to the rope for the obligatory Proof Shot.

Waiting to get in.

Ever so appropriate.  You can take me anywhere.

The Louvre was wonderful, but so completely overwhelming.  Also most of the captions and info are only in French, so I wasn't exactly certain what I was looking at a lot of the time.  We motored through the Big Three (Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, and Venus de Milo) in 30 minutes and beat the vast majority of the crowd, and then spent most of the rest of our time in the Egyptian wings.  I had originally wanted to do an entire day in the Louvre, but this was when I thought I'd be alone.  Suffice to say, my travel partner got Museumed-Out before I did.  We left in the early afternoon, and I was fine with that because Paris has more to see than can ever be accomplished in a mere week, even if you go 110% like Eve and I did.

We saw the Eiffel Tower both during the day and at night.  Of course.

Evie lovin' life.

Sisters lovin' life

Notre Dame, also of course, although the line to get into the bell tower was EPIC (our pass did not help), so we did not go up.

"Say 'Esmerelda!'"

Eve said "It looks like you're leaving."

We took a day trip out to Giverny to see the Monet Gardens.  The gardens were beautiful but the crowds were awful.  At least we had a beautiful day though!

Famous Japanese footbridge, complete with crowds not featured in his paintings

Our last day in Paris, we spent at Versailles.  Which will likely get a post all its own for a variety of reasons.  But for now, let's just say that the weather was not the best, and the crowds here made Giverny look empty.

Versailles in the rain.

Croooooowwwwds.

Oddly, our favorite part of Versailles was not the palace at all, but Marie Antoinette's Petite Triannon and neighboring village.

And holy hell, we did so much more.  Our first afternoon after finding and checking into our hostel, we found a perfect sidewalk cafe with a view of the Sacre Cour, and had quiche, veggie lasagna and a bottle of wine.

A-MAZ-ing

One night, a fellow hostel-stayer invited us along on a pub crawl through the Moulin Rouge district, shepherding us through three local bars and finally ending in a small but quite lively Montmartre club.

Our BFFs for the night.

Lawd.  What else?  We saw Napoleon's tomb, the Rodin Museum (The Thinker is in the garden!), and climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe.  We saw so many churches Eve is now counting them in the eighties.  We visited the Conciergerie where Marie Antoinette was held before her execution, took a river cruise on the Seine, and saw the famous Water Lily rooms in the Orangerie where Monet's famous gigantic water lily paintings are housed.  Took the metro out to the end of the line and visited St. Denis Cathedral, which is in a surprisingly sad sorry state, given that it is the place where all (most?) of France's kings and queens are buried from the time of the Merovingians, including Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, and Louis XIV.  We climbed all over Montmartre, visited the breathtaking Sacre Cour, fended off pickpockets and gypsies, and spent an hour looking for Paris's only vineyard because we misread the guidebook and thought they had a tasting room there.  (They did not.)  We walked through the Tuileries and Eve touched the Forbidden Grass at Versailles.

On the Seine

From the top of the Arc

Sainte Chapelle

St. Denis, where the kings and queens of France are buried.

I loved Paris, every second, even the frustrating ones.  It meant so much to be able to see this incredible city with my sister, because Paris makes her feel like this:

But that's okay, because Paris makes me feel like this:

And Paris was already two whole cities ago... there's Dijon and then Lyon to talk about, and no rest for the wicked because tomorrow we crazy girls are off to the ALPS.  There's been no shortage of adventure so far.  And I see very little chance of that changing any time soon.