As I had said, my alarm was set for a very early 3 AM. I'm pretty sure I did not sleep at all prior to it going off. I should have been tired, but instead I was really excited about finally getting to Paris! The drive down to where we were taking the train was pretty uneventful, and we got the car parked and found the place we needed to be with plenty of time to spare.
Once our train got there and we got situated on board, we were off! It was a great way to travel. If we were to drive, it would take us about 4.5 hours from my house to get to Paris (but I would have to deal with Paris traffic and parking). Instead we drove 1.5 hours to the train station and road the train for a little over 2 hours. The train was (at times) traveling at over 300 kilometers per hour - pretty crazy.
We arrived in Paris, and I will admit... I really wasn't sure what to do. We all agreed we should go to our hotel and get our stuff dropped off and situated. That seemed like a good plan. However... I had no idea how to get there. I had tried to research the metro system prior to going... and yeah. I was a touch lost. Luckily we found a tourist information office and the man kindly showed me exactly what we had to do to get to our hotel. We bought passes and were on our way. Our hotel had advantages and disadvantages. The huge advantage was the price. I was trying to find a room for us and was finding prices around $600-$1000. Which.... well, that's a lot to swallow. My dad travels frequently for business and has a lot of rewards points built up with Hilton. Hilton had sent him an email about "deals" - and there was one for the Hilton at Orly Airport in Paris. And the deal was much cheaper than anything I could find. Plus, another advantage, was the hotel was a Hilton, so it was most likely going to be nice and clean (it was). The disadvantage was our hotel was quite a ways out of the city. We had to take a shuttle van from the hotel to the airport (free at least), then take a little shuttle train from the airport to the main rail line, then ride the train for about 20-30 minutes into Paris. At the time it really didn't seem like it took that long, but the total journey from hotel to Paris or Paris to hotel took about 45 minutes to an hour. Inconvenient. But. What can ya do.
We found our hotel and got settled (and I must say, for the first journey of getting on the right train, finding the airport train, then getting our hotel shuttle, we did well). We got some lunch at the hotel (another advantage of the Hilton - a restaurant and bar right there), and then headed back into the city. I decided an easy place to start (based on the train) was Notre Dame. As I've said before, I'm big into seeing Europe's amazing churches. This one definitely made it into my top 4 (which, if you're curious are, in no particular order St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Koln Cathedral, the Siena Cathedral, and Notre Dame). Gorgeous. No other words. HUGE. Absolutely huge. After walking through the inside we walked all along the outer perimeter. There is no detail which was forgotten when this was built. Notre Dame is celebrating its 850th birthday - but we were too early to see any of the festivities for it.
After Notre Dame we decided to walk to the Louvre. Noelle, in her own words, isn't a museum person. Which I understand. I told her the only museum we were going to take her to was the Louvre because you can't go to Paris and NOT see the Mona Lisa. We walked from Notre Dame to the Louvre. it should have been a straight shot... but... we got a little lost. Well, not lost... just took a few wrong turns. But that's okay because we got to see more of Paris. So beautiful!
We made our way to the Louvre and stood in line. As we were standing there my mom, calm as can be I might add, turns to me and says, "That's Neil Diamond. Right there." I asked her if she was sure (it did look like him, but I mean, come on, really?), and she told me to listen to him talk. Sure enough, it was his voice. No mistaking it. I wanted I (for my mom's sake - she's a huge fan) to say something or ask for an autograph... but instead we just let him be a tourist like the rest of us. Noelle did take a photo with her phone where he is in the background behind us... but I'm pretty sure we'd be the only people to know it is the side of his face/head. SIGH.
We went through the Louvre and did wander a bit to look at things... but our main focus was to see the two major pieces everyone wants to see: the Mona Lisa and the Venus Di Milo. We saw them both. Mission accomplished. Mom said she was a bit disappointed in the size of the Mona Lisa. I already knew it would be smaller from other people who had seen it and told me...
We left the Louvre and it was starting to get dark. We walked towards a large ferris wheel (which we had seen earlier in the day, but now it was lit up). I really want to go for a spin on the wheel because I thought it would be a great way to see the city, but my mom refused. She said Noelle and I could go for a ride, but she wasn't going to. I wasn't about to leave her standing alone in the dark... so we kept on walking. As we passed the ferris wheel I could see little stands lining the street ahead. The Paris Christmas market! We had found it! We spent most of the evening wandering up one side of the street and down the other - the market was huge! We had some Gluwein, Mom had her first waffle with Nutella, and Noelle had french friends with mayonnaise. I was a bit disappointed in this Christmas Market as it was very repetative - the types of stands simply repeated themselves over and over in a set pattern. But. They did have some amazing Christmas decorations.
After the market we started to wander around more - it was fully dark at this point and things were starting to light up. We wandered and took pictures... and then decided to head back to the hotel. We were on the train (we found a station and got on the right one - yahoo!) when suddenly they made an announcement about something, and the train stop we needed to get off at was listed. A bunch of people got off the train. I decided we should too. So, got off the train, went to an information booth, and discovered someone had left a bag at the station we wanted to get off at, so no trains were stopping there (possible security problem/bomb threat). We were told to go outside and take a bus to a certain point, then we'd be able to get back on the train. We waited in the cold for about 20 minutes for this bus. When the bus got there it was CRAMMED full of people. We barely had any room to breathe. I'm assuming the bus was so full because of the problem with the train. We rode the bus for about 10 stops and got off where we had been told to. But... we couldn't see the train station. We were no where near a train station. So. We started walking. We had no idea where we were suppose to go, or what direction this train station was in. My mom suggested asking someone, which I wanted to, but I wanted to pick the "right" person to ask (someone who looked friendly, business-like who most likely would speak some English and wouldn't want to mess with us). Somehow in our wanderings we stumbled upon the train station (miraculously). However, the station was still closed for security reasons. At this point I started to look for a taxi to just take us the rest of the way... but didn't find one. FINALLY the train station opened and we were able to get to the airport and to our hotel. It only took two hours. After that experience we decided to have some wine at the hotel bar. What a first day.
In the morning there were still some security issues - we weren't allowed to board the train at the airport. Instead we were told to take a bus to a specific train station. Luckily this bus dropped us off directly at said train station and we didn't have to wander around trying to find it. Our time on our second day was a bit limited because we had our tour that evening, so we decided to do a hop-on-hop-off tour bus. It worked out perfectly. We were able to see around the city, get some history, understand the layout a bit better. We also we were able to decide what we'd like to do the next day. After our bus tour, we headed back to the hotel to get ready for our night out. This is another time where our hotel's location kind of shot us in the foot. We needed to have enough time to get back to the hotel, change and get ready, and then make it back into the city for our tour. Which ate up a big chunk of the day.
However, we were off back into the city anxious for our night of dinner at the Eiffel Tower and the Moulin Rouge show. We were suppose to meet at a specific business in the city. The business suggested three close metro stops. We took the metro to a specific stop, got off... and then tried our best to find our way. I had brought my GPS to try and help. It didn't help. We ended up walked quite a few blocks in the wrong direction. We eventually found the right place, but I was quite annoyed - mainly with myself. I felt like it was my job to get us to the right places on time, and it all depended on me... and well, all I seemed to do was get us lost. It's a lot of stress to be the severely near-sighted leading the blind.
When we got checked in we were told we were booked to see the 9 PM Moulin Rouge show (there are shows at 9 or 11). Seeing the earlier show meant that we would have to do the river cruise at another time on our own. I was prepared for this because they warned me of it when I booked the tour (which is why I booked the tour on the second day so we'd have another day to make up the cruise if needed). As it was, this worked out perfectly. We were bussed to the Eiffel Tower and taken up to the first level where we had dinner. At dinner we shared our table with a young girl from Australia who was quite fun to talk to. I thought dinner was amazing. My mom and Noelle were a bit more unsure. Our first course was raw salmon (which was delicious). I have to give them credit, Mom and Noelle ate it without much fuss. During dinner we had some great views of the city and were able to see what it's like when the lights go off (twinkle) from the inside. After dinner we went back out to the bus and were taken to the Moulin Rouge with barely enough time. We were only seated maybe 5 minutes when the show started. If there was ever a definition of "nose bleed" seats, we definitely had them... but, despite sitting at the very last table in the back, we still had a good view of the stage and the show. The show was AMAZING. Simply amazing. I didn't understand a single word of the French singing, and yes, the women basically danced around topless wearing a glitter G-string... and it was still just fabulous. A great show. At one point in time a pool rose up onto the stage, and there were snakes swimming around in the pool. A girl jumped into the pool (essentially naked) to swim and dance with these snakes. Ohhhh man talk about creepy yet awesome. After the show we took a taxi back to the hotel as I didn't want to put ourselves at risk taking the metro at night. Our taxi ride was surprisingly easy and cheaper than I had thought it would be. It was an amazing night.
The next morning we agreed our first priority of the day was shopping. We went back to the Avenue des Champes Elysees, which is where the Christmas Market was. We had noticed tons of shops around there the previous day. I find it amazing that you can walk only two blocks yet still make it into so many stores. We had a late lunch at a little Italian sidewalk cafe. Noelle had her first real Italian pizza. I had told her she would eat the whole thing, and I was right. Ha ha. After our shopping we decided to go back to the Eiffel Tower to take some pictures. We wandered around the area, took pictures, and then I made my mom and Noelle have a crepe with Nutella. You can't go to Europe - especially Paris - and not have a crepe with Nutella. Noelle was a bit skeptical, but she agreed it was delicious. After our snack, we decided to take our river cruise. It was close to 5 PM and it was getting dark. The cruise took about an hour. We didn't exactly see anything we hadn't already seen... but it was neat to see everything at night all lit up. When our boat got back we were just in time to see the Eiffel Tower's lights doing their "show." Such a beautiful sight. After that we called it a night - we were pooped.
The next morning we got all of our stuff packed up - our train was leaving at 1 PM. We decided to just head to the train station - we couldn't really thing of anything we wanted to do last minute, and we wanted to make sure we were there on time to leave. When we got the train station we had plenty of time to kill, so Noelle and I wandered around shopping while my mom enjoyed a cup of coffee. Our train arrived, we got on, and thought we were heading home. About a half hour into our journey, they made an announcement. They said it first in German, then in French before repeating it a third time in English. There was something wrong with the track ahead - a blockage? - so we were going to be parked in Lorraine, France for an undisclosed amount of time. My reaction to this was one of whatever. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it. A few minutes later they came back on saying we'd be re-directed... and the train would not be stopping at the stop we needed. Hmmm. Okay. We were informed that we would get off at the first stop the train came to, and we'd have to catch another train to another spot, then another train to get back to our stop. JOY. But again, nothing I could do about it. We were suppose to arrive at our train station originally at 3:30. We got to the new detoured station around 4:40. We got sandwiches and figured out where to go... and got on our next train, which we road for about 50 minutes. We then changed trains for another 30 minute ride to the station we needed. We arrived around 6:30.
At this point my nerves were beyond shot. I was stressed by the whole situation because I didn't have control over it, and (like so many other situations I find myself in) I didn't have the communication skills I needed. So I was stressing about getting all of us back to the right spot (because clearly I was in charge... the near sighted leading the blind) and I really had no clue what I was doing. I was just trying to get us to the right spot... faking it til we made it. At one point in time I really lost my temper with my mom. We were waiting to get off the train at our detour station when they made an announcement - first in German, then in French. There was a pause before they began to repeat the announcement in English, and my mom said, "What did they say?!" To which I responded, "I don't know, I don't speak French!!!" Which, I do feel bad that I snapped at her. I do. (Sorry Mom). But... honestly. I don't speak anything but English. She had a better chance of understanding the explanation in German than I did of understanding anything. I got annoyed a few times in Paris with her as well because she would ask if we were on the right train or going to the right place or in the right direction. Now, I may not have a clue where I'm going (I'll be the first to admit that), but I certainly have more of a clue than she did. Why are you questioning your (slightly lost and incompetent but nonetheless) leader? Noelle just chuckled through all of this saying she completely understood because her mom is the same way (she is. Sisters). At one point in Paris Noelle asked me if we were on the right train, to which I said, "Noelle. Your Claassen is showing."
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