Egypt and Europe: April - May 2009 PART II

After the disaster that was Egypt, I was very keen to leave all of that ridiculousness behind me and move on to Europe. We arrived in Charles De Gaulle International Airport at about 6:30 pm on the 23rd of April, and I was rather surprised by the complete and utter lack of security or any kind of customs. We met up with another member of our travelling party who had bypassed Egypt and flown in from Australia, and then got on the train to Place de Clinchy, where our hotel was. I later found out that the hotel we stayed at was the same hotel Liam Neeson's character stayed at in the movie Taken.

The next day, we decided to walk around Paris instead of doing some 60 euro tour, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole trip. We started off by catching the Metro to St Michel's Place, where we walked to Notre Dame, which you can see in the above photo. I actually love the Metro - the convenience of trains arriving every two minutes, coupled with the randomness of the back-flipping buskers make for an interesting train trip, much more interesting than any trip on a QR train.

Inside the Notre Dame, with its gorgeous stained glass windows, beautiful gothic architecture, and various statues and shrines to saints. I kept thinking of Quasimodo, and hoping there'd be some kind of reference to the Victor Hugo novel.

Our walk continued from Notre Dame over the Seine to the Centre Culturel G. Pompidou, where we watched a woman playing the digeredoo, and on to the Louvre. People under the age of 26 get in for free (yay!), and so we wandered around for a while, looking at the gorgeous ceilings, the Venus de Milo, and the Mona Lisa.

We then made our way along the Seine, past the Musee D'Orsay and the National Assemblee to the Eiffel Tower, where we made friends with a guy from the Cameroon, which was... interesting, to say the least. The tower was so much taller than I was expecting, and I felt dizzy just looking up at it. It does make for some pretty awesome photos though.

I have a problem with heights, obviously, so I remained at the bottom while my friend made her way to the top and took some pretty spectacular photos, like this one.

The one thing I missed out on that I was really keen to see was the cemetery where Oscar Wilde was buried, but I know for sure that I will go back to Paris one day. It is a beautiful city, with awesome food, and a lovely vibe, and I would love to spend more time there. The people were much friendlier than I was expecting, with the exception of a certain woman in a cafe who made rude shooing gestures to us when we didnt vacate immediately after buying our coffees. Paris is definitely up there in my list of favourite places I have to see again.