La Paris!

I am in Paris!!

On the morning of the 28th (Friday), my parents and I loaded up my very stuffed full suitcase and backpack into the car, and we were off to Oklahoma City.  In the airport I checked my bag, and then met my travel buddy, Ashley.  After many hugs and goodbyes, we went through security, and then I got lunch at Schlotsky's in the airport.  Before too long our plane boarded, and we began a non-eventful flight to Houston, which took less than an hour.  Once we landed, we knew we wouldn't have much time to get from terminal A to terminal E on the far end of the airport, so we asked directions to the terminalink, which is the train that runs between terminals.  We took that, and once in the right terminal, we preceeded to walk all the way to gate 20, where our boarding passes told us to go, knowing we would arrive with almost no time to spare.  Much to our surprise, the flight leaving from gate 20 was headed to London Heathrow! After checking a monitor, we realized that our flight had been moved to gate 2, and we had to race all the way across the terminal, and we made it right when the last rows were boarding.

That flight was probably the longest I've ever been on.  It was nine hours from Houston to Paris.  We were served supper, and then I tried to sleep, but I didn't succeed for very long, maybe just a couple hours.  But finally, FINALLY, after my neighbor's movie had repeated itself about four times, and after we were all very sore, they served us breakfast of un croissant et des fruits, et du jus d'orange et cafe.  I thought it was pretty yummy.

Then we landed in Charles De Gaulle airport.  That airport was a fiasco.  Customs was actually not so bad; the line was pretty short, and we didn't wait too long.  They just looked at our passports, gave us stamps, and waved us on through.  Then we tried to find the shuttle we had reserved to take us from the airport to our hotel.  So we asked the lady at the information desk, and she just rolled her eyes and said "I hate these things, you always have to call them to come and get you."  And she pointed at the payphone.  So, we went to the payphone, which was quite different from an American payphone, and there were many buttons with symbols that we had no idea what they meant.  So we just started putting coins in whatever looked like it might be a coin slot, and dialing the number, and pushing various buttons.  After multiple tries and just feeling silly, we finally gave up and decided to use a cell phone and just pay for the call.  The lady who answered struggled to understand my English, and I struggled to understand her French.  Eventually, I thought I understood enough of what she said to be able to make a more educated guess as to where the shuttle driver would meet us.  So we wend down a level and went to the exit where we thought we should go and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  After asking a few people who were standing there, someone told us we should probably go up a level, so we did, and went to the exit with the same number.  Unfortunately, it was closed because of construction, as were many of the exits nearby.  While we were wandering around the airport trying to figure out what to do, several people with thick accents kept approaching us, asking us if we wanted a taxi.  Of course, we knew better than to accept, even though we were starting to think about taking a taxi rather than keeping searching for this shuttle.  Eventually we went back to the information desk, and they pointed us to where we could get an official airport taxi.  We went there, and showed the address of our hotel to both the lady in charge and the taxi driver, who spoke Arabic to each other trying to figure out where it was.  Once they seemed agreed, we got in, and the taxi driver proceeded to take us to the wrong hotel, which we didn't realize until he had already left.  Then we had to talk to the people at the apartment/hotel where he had dropped us off, get a map, and have them call us another taxi.  The taxi they called was called a blue taxi, but it was in fact silver.  Once we realized it was there, it didn't take us long to get to our hotel, where we dropped off our luggage (since we couldn't check in for a few more hours).

top of Eiffel Tower

We spent the rest of the morning and the early afternoon walking around the area.  It's a very nice part of town; not very touristy, and of course every thing is very old.  It's actually very near the Eiffel Tower; we can even see the top of it from one corner.  There were lots and lots of boulangeries (bakeries), and we kept seeing people wheeling around these little grocery carts full of baguettes and other groceries, and we wondered where they were coming from.  The baguettes, of course, could have come from any number of the boulangeries, but we eventually discovered un marché, or a market about the size of a small grocery store.  We went in looking for batteries and came out with cookies :D. I've almost eaten all of mine.

Then we were getting cold and hungry, but it was a long time yet until we could check into our hotel, so we started looking for a place to eat.  Eventually, we decided on a small Japanese place.  It turned out to be a little family-owned place with very excellent food.  Ashley and I liked it quite a lot.

Ashley enjoying Japanese food

After a while, we headed back to the hotel to check in, but no one was there, so we went to a little church across the street so we could stay warm.  After standing around and reading the announcements posted in French, we eventually went back to the hotel and checked in.  We were too tired to do much after that, so we just got settled in, watched some TV in French, checked in with our parents, and went to bed around 5pm our time.

This morning, being Sunday the 30th, we slept in a bit and then got pastries at the boulangerie on the corner for breakfast.  After that, we went to an 11 am mass at the little Catholic church across the street.  It was very interesting; being all in French, I struggled to understand everything, but I got some of it.  I believe the sermon was about the Beatitudes.  After church we came back to the hotel to plan what to do, and once we decided to go to the Louvre, we had to figure out the metro so we could get there.  To be honest, the hardest part was probably getting to the first metro station from our hotel; the rest was pretty easy.  We bought tickets, changed twice, and we were there!

Ashley and I in front of the Louvre

  Let me tell you, the Louvre is incredible!  I can't post all 146 pictures I took, but if you look at my Picassa account, you can see them by clicking here  Anyway, we spent a couple hours there, but then it started to close, so we had to leave.

front view of the Louvre and the glass pyramid

Venus de Milo

 

The Mona Lisa