Paris, France

I’m sitting in the Paris airport on Wednesday 6/15/05 when I should be in Spain getting ready to go to Rome. I guess that is what happens when you make plans. Traveling is always an adventure, but I don’t mind when things go according to plan.

It is Friday, 6/10/05, and I attend my two classes as they are setting up for the King of France to visit San Lorenzo del Escorial outside our window. I know I’m not going to be here when he comes, but I’m sure I wouldn’t of got a good view of him anyway, though I might stay if I would get to meet him. I head to lunch where were go through our 3 course ordeal where I try some new foods and get reminded that American food is by far my favorite…even American versions of other countries foods. I end up taking a siesta like the rest of the town and waking up ready for dinner. The girls are still at the gym, so I walk around the town for awhile, but the grocery store is already closed. I’m starting to get a good internal map of the place, of course now that the program is almost over. We end up having dinner at the hotel restaurant. Expensive, but convenient…that is probably the motto of this entire trip. We then go over to the Red Frog to have a few drinks. Most of the students were gone, so it was somewhat quiet there. I had a few beers and played darts (can you say undefeated), while Bianca and Sarah Beth shared two bottles of wine. Needless to say, Sarah Beth got sick that night and threw up over the floor. I’m glad I’m still not a wine drinker.

On Saturday, we made our way to the bus station and took the bus to Madrid. On the bus were two of our professors who were going to Madrid for the day. Bianca talked to them for a while about France, but I just napped. When we got there, we jumped on the metro and figured our way over to the airport. We were flying a little known Argentina’s airline, but the check in wasn’t too bad. We got some food and there were two American girls in line in front of us. It was funny because they were the stereotypical rich white American girls, acting all Paris Hilton like doing their European Travels. I judge people quickly I think, but they lived up to this. We go on the plan and the stewardess looked just how you would imagine them, tall, skinny attractive and French. There was a problem with the plan and we had to go back to the tarmac, but though Sarah Beth argued it was her bad luck, I viewed it as my good fortune that they caught the problem and we did not crash. We showed up to France two hours later than we planned, but it was no big deal. I was really worried about the language problem, and I did not even know how to say hello or thank you. Luckily, most people speak English, even though a lot won’t talk to you out of spite. Some people were really rude, others were very nice. I guess it is like the rest of the world. The first thing we noticed was how cold it was, something none of us were prepared for. Women were wearing scarves. We found a bus that took us to the center of town since the airport was somewhat far. We then take their metro system (which I have to say is complicated, mainly because of all their other non-metro lines) to our stop. We then find our hotel and check out our room. It was much nicer than our hostel, but my allergies didn’t like it much. Everywhere in Europe, you need a key for your lights. Man they are all about conserving energy and saying money. We then decide to go and eat at this Tex-Mex restaurant we saw called El Rancho. Who the hell goes from Texas to France to try tex-mex, but we were hungry and it was fun. The food was ok, very non-tex mex, like the chips were like fake Doritos…but I have to admit the food was filling and better than anything I have eaten in Spain. We go home, watch the Chappell show we had on DVD on my laptop and went to bed.

On Sunday morning, we got up early and I took a shower. The water was cold and I guess it took a long time to warm up, but all you could hear was me yelling fuck as I tried to clean myself in a very small shower. It finally got warm and the pressure was good, but I like Spanish showers better. We went and had our free breakfast, where I had a lot of crossants and boiled eggs, cheese and oj. I also had some French toast.

We started our tour for the day. So Paris is known for Fashion, but it didn’t impress me too much. It just seemed very European. I do admit that the women are a lot more attractive than the Spanish women, but I still think American women are better…though, they were all skinny. The guys pants were too tight and a lot of girls had the Ashley Simpson haircut, but there was a lot less of that mullet cut.

We start off at the Arc de Triumph, which was the main place I wanted to go. Over 5 years ago, I got a postcard of it and knew that one day I too would get to visit it. It brought a lot of things full circle for me. It as pretty awesome and though I have seen the replica in NYC, it was awesome seeing it here. We ran into a guy who was a law studying working in London visiting Spain and chilled with him for a while as we did our sightseeing. Sarah Beth got into an altercation with a French man over throwing away some batteries and was introduced to French people being assholes. Bianca went over and gave him a piece of her mind, to the point where he pushed that security button and two guards came over to make sure everything was ok. The guy defended his actions of telling her to say please and may and all this crap, while being an ass, while Bianca let him know that he can’t be a jerk and get away with it.

We then jumped our tour bus that you hop on and off from. I totally recommend paying for this. You get ear phones if you want to hear the audio tour, but mainly, it gets you where you want to go. We got to see many sights and got off at the Effiel Tower. I was at the fuckign Effiel tower, how cool is that.

Before we got in line, we went to eat at a local restaurant. It was some of the best food I have had on this trip and by far was not one of the most expensive. It was filling, but didn’t weigh you down. Now part of my trip is going from country to country trying all their cokes since they have different formulations. The coke in France is similar to that of Spain, maybe a bit sweeter, but expensive as shit. I’m not even going to say how much I paid to drink coke, but it was much more than I could ever justify.

We went back to the tower and it is very large and we got in line to go to the top despite my fear of heights. It was a many hour ordeal to get to the top, but it was well worth it when you are up there seeing the entire city and knowing you are on top of one of the top sightseeing spots in the world. Oh, since Paris is in the running for the Olympics, they had signs everywhere of Paris 2012. They are in the lead and I hope they win. They had a sign on the tower as well.


We then took the tour bus to Notre Dame, by passing the Lovue knowing we would be back, and when we got there, it was closing, so we decided to come back later. We got some ice cream, and bought souvenirs. We then decide to try and walk to our boat cruise. It was a long walk and right before we got there, we were almost killed by a huge tour bus as we were crossing the street. The driver wasn’t looking as she turned left and the guy in the front with her made her stop, as we started like deers in headlights at the huge bus coming right at us. But, we were ok. We got on our boat at 11pm for the 1 hour tour. It was nice that it was night time and you could see things all lit up, but it was most of the stuff we saw that day. There were many Asian tourists on there with us, and by many, I mean almost everyone on there. It was a good time to relax our feet from walking all day and just enjoy the sights.

Afterwards, we decided to eat at the McDonalds in Paris. The food wasn’t too bad and man all the ones we saw looked really awesome. They look all fashionable and cool, not like a fast food restaurant. We then called it a night and went home.

On Monday, our last day, we started even earlier with breakfast and headed out to our tour bus that dropped us off at the Louve. I really wanted to go to this museum. The place was cool, we saw a mummy, lots of famous sculptures and paintings and the Mona Lisa. Like everyone else who has seen it, I took thought it was much smaller than I expected. I really don’t know exactly why it is so famous, but not it is even more famous for being famous. I saw it and took a picture. After, we went to Notre Dame and had some lunch at a French restaurant. The food again was good, and I had my first try of French Fries. I forget the story, but I remember something about them not being French I think…are they from Idaho? We then toured Notre Dame and even stayed for mass. Because we stayed for mass, the girls missed out going to the Cartier store, I did not mind. We then went shopping, something that is always fun for boys. I was a good sport and they looked around for hours, but the places we went to were very expensive. I did get to go to Virgin Records and purchased La Oreja “Paris” cd, which is cool, mixing Spain and France in that purchase. After waiting on a bench for an hour as they looked for stuff, we headed back toward the hotel so that we could eat. We found a nice tavern and ate there. We became friends with a drunk guy who didn’t know English, but was really drunk. There was this French couple we talked to who told us the whole don’t like Bush, but like Americans thing. He was a cool guy who had just come back from visiting LA. We were invited to go out, but decided to go home instead and sleep so we could catch our flight.

Tuesday morning, we woke up and caught our shuttle to the airport. Once again, we paid more money for the convience. We get to the airport and find our check in counter. Here we were reminded what jerks the French can be. Long story short, we are getting our tickets to board our flights and the people decide to be dicks. They say we need proof we are leaving Spain, proof we have in Spain. Since we only have etickets of our flights to the US, we offer to show them on the internet downstairs, but they decline. Sarah gets proof from her airline which was close by, but for Bianca and me, ours was in a whole other terminal and there wasn’t time to get there and back since it was so fucking far. We fight with them, they pretty much say fuck you and we sent off Sarah alone back to Spain. They told us if we got the proof, we could fly on Weds at 6pm and pay an extra 50 euro fee. We are now stranded in Paris for another day. So we call our travel agent to book us a hotel, she does and it’s expensive. Well we find our way to the hotel, which took forever and guess what, they have no rooms. We make another expensive call to our agent and she told us they same thing, (you’d think she would of told us on the phone originally) and all the hotels were booked in Paris, so she got us a hotel by EuroDisney, now Disney Paris. So we pay 70 euro (fuckload) to take a cab out there and finally get to sleep. We wake up and eat dinner there at the hotel. We met this African guy who moved to France to study business and he told us what he thought about America. He says he wants to go, but only when he has money because he thinks America does not care about its poor. That everyone has money or is poor. I guess to an extent all he was saying was true, but not entirely, but it cool seeing how people from different parts of the world see your country. He kept making it seem like we were rich, which we tried to tell him we were not. After dinner, it is too late to go to the park, so we just go to Disney Village at night. It was an ok experience, but I would of rather been back in Spain getting ready to leave for Rome. We try to find internet, but to no avail. We then buy a few beers and watch Chappel Show.

The next morning, we have our breakfast and then take the Disney bus to the airport at noon. We arrive and our counter is empty and we have to wait until 4 pm to check in, so we write our post cards and just chill for 3 hours in the airport waiting to check in. We find a spot by McDonalds and spend hours there, reading, listening to music and writing post cards. We finally go check in and guess what, they don’t even ask for our proof that we are leaving Spain, the very reason we stayed an entire day, but they did remember to charge us money. The flight was delayed of course, but after a long day of travel, we finally made it in right before midnight.

I went straight to my room and started to unpack. I then went to talk to Sarah and Bianca about our plans for Thursday and what we were going to do. I then got a quick bite to eat at the bowling alley, watched the end of the Chappell show season 2 and went to bed.