Europe Tour: Day 4

Sat. 09-01-07 -- London, England and Paris, France
Originally published on: 09-07-07

This morning was our last day in London until we return in October. I got up early (before Kara) and walked around a bit looking for an internet café. However it was around 7am so nothing was open. That means I'm still not able to transfer our pics to my website. So I went back to our hostel and used their computers (no USB devices allowed) and typed up a few more journal entries.

By then it was around 8:30am so I went back to our room to wake Kara up. Once she was up, we made breakfast and lunch; ate the breakfast and stored the lunch. We packed up our suitcases and checked out and caught the tube to Waterloo Station. We had a little over an hour to kill so we walked back over to the Imperial War Museum. This time we watched a film about Crimes Against Humanity, briskly walked through the espionage exhibit, got some close up time with a few of the tanks, and finally walked through an exhibit about WWII through the eyes of the children at the time. When we got to the museum, they let us check our big backpacks, so it was really an excellent (and free) usage of a bit of downtime.

At noon we walked back to the train station and checked in. We still had to wait for maybe a half hour, but then we were allowed to bored the train.

Not much to report on the train ride. The train went fast, the Chunnel was dark, and I used the time to plan our Paris activities. Using the torn out Paris sections of 3 guide books (Rick Steves', Let's Go, & Lonely Planet). I came up with a list of what we might want to do, and I shuffled them around to make them fit. I wasn't quite sure what we were going to do today though since we wouldn't even get to our room until about 6pm.

Once the train arrived at Paris Gard Nord, we went to the ticket counter to buy our tickets to Normandy for the 4th. I went to the first counter: Me: "Bonjour" Her: "Bonjour" Me: "parlez-vous anglais?" Her: [shakes head no]... So we backed up and waited for the window that said ENGLISH SPOKEN. When there, we got our tickets to and from Normandy (Caen) with little difficulty. Then we asked about the night train to Irún (Basque country in Spain) for the 6th, and she said no beds... Well crap, we're supposed to meet Jeff & Jessie there on the 7th! We left the counter and talked and looked over the schedule. We thought maybe we could catch a day train on the 7th, so we got back in line and asked about that. The guy said there were availabilities on the 12pm train which would get us there by 4pm-ish. That would work, but we still need to get final confirmation from Jessie before we book it, so we said thank you and filed that info away for later use.

With tickets dealt with for a while, we got Euros out of an ATM & headed down into the Metro. It looks like Paris has a pretty sophisticated underground network, but they don't have the automated ticket dispenser thing ironed out yet (more on that later). I had to purchase two tickets to our stop from a counter, and we had issues because I was apparently butchering the French pronunciation of 'Port Royal.' After repeating it a few times, the man at the ticket counter finally said "Ahh, Porh Rah-yaleh" and printed our tickets! The ride was not long, and then we were on the street in our neighbourhood. We hoofed our big packs a few blocks down to our hotel on Rue Berthollet. A quick check-in and a ride up a tiny elevator, and we had finally made it to our room.

We hadn't yet decided what to do with the remains of the day, so I took the tour book to the bathroom. A short while later, I was a pound lighter and I had a plan! (the gross poop reference is a tribute to Micah).

We took a train to Notre-Dame and as soon as we emerged from underground, we saw the massive cathedral facade. We got up close and took a bunch of pictures. The facade has tons of detail, it was very cool to look all around it and see all the statues. We walked completely around the cathedral, then we walked to the other end of the island we were on and got in line for a night boat cruise on the Seine. We had to wait around 30 minutes, but that ended up being good because it let the sky darken and the building & bridge lights to come on. The boat ride was good, we saw a lot of buildings along the Seine, and of course the Eiffel Tower. Continuing the "things look different in person" tour, the Eiffel Tower was bigger and fatter than I thought it was. It was all lit up and it was cool to see the elevators moving up and down on the inside.

The boat tour lasted about one hour, so it was around 10pm when we were back on the street. We walked back to the metro station and discovered that the ticket window was closed for the night! We tried using the lone machine in the station, but it wouldn't take our credit card OR our coins! So basically we were screwed, no way on the Metro! I had read that you can buy Metro tickets at tobacco shops, so we walked around a bit to see if we could find one... no luck. We found a bus station, but the sign said our line was no longer running. So it was taxi or walk, and since we were about a mile from home, we decided to walk. I was a little worried since it was like 11pm by this time and we're walking the streets on our first in a foreign city. But there was still a lot of people on the street, so I figured it was safe enough. Well, it would have been a good plan had we not got lost... We ended up spiralling around our street until we finally found it. In all we probably walked an extra 1-1.5 miles. By the time we finally found our hotel, we were exhausted and hungry since we had not had dinner yet. There was a little corner store, so we went in to see what kind of food we could buy. There wasn't much selection, so we walked out with 3 small bananas, a 7up, and a beer... When we got to our room, we were so tired that we must have been delirious, because we started laughing hysterically at what the shopkeeper must have thought of us going shopping around midnight for 3 bananas & some beverages.