So far the European trips I’ve made have all been to visit people—Hannah in Madrid and my cousin Rachel in Dublin. But I don’t know anybody who’s studying in Paris, and I was determined to get there. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to find Americans studying abroad in London who want to take a weekend trip to Paris, so my friend Katie and I decided to go after the last weekend of classes. We searched around for hostels and travel fares and we found a place called the Perfect Hostel in Montmartre—with a name like that we knew it had to be good. Booking travel was a little more complicated, but after searching hi and low we found the best fares were on the bus, so we decided to defer our comfort to our wallets and suck it up for the eight hours each way that the bus from London to Paris was going to take.
In the end I’m really glad that we chose the bus. Yes the eight-hour journey was long, but it was far from dull. We got gorgeous views of the British and French countryside, including getting to see the white cliffs of Dover, and the herds of sheep and Clydesdales, which freckled the countryside. There was also a rainstorm while we were driving which was followed by a rainbow. I’ve seen rainbows before, but never like this. It was stretching over a field and made a complete arch—if I looked out the back of the bus I could see where the other edge touched down. It was a fabulous reminder of the things you miss when you spend your entire time cooped up in cities, but I took it as a sign of good luck for our up coming urban adventure.
The question everyone asks when they hear you are going from England to France is how are you going to cross the Channel. I was hoping that the bus would go through the Chunnel, simply because I love that word. Chunnel. It makes me smile. However, the bus was going taking a ferry from Dover to Calais. In the end that proved to be much more enjoyable than the Chunnel because it meant there was an hour in our trip where we could get out and walk around the ferry, which boasted a whole host of amenities including two bars, a coffee shop, an arcade, and a duty free shop, not to mention a slew of restaurants. We spent most of our time watching the sea out of the window, and ogling the chocolate in the duty free shop. The ferry also allowed us to get wonderful views of the White Cliffs of Dover, which are really impressive and, well, white. I tried to take pictures, but none of them really came out.
We arrived in Paris an hour ahead of time, and schlepped our luggage through the metro to our Perfect Hostel. The Hostel itself was really more of a hotel (with hostel prices!) and we had a room to ourselves, which was lovely. We decided to go out in search of dinner and ended up at a pizza place near the hotel. If you are going to be staying in London for an extended period of time let me just warn you that Londoners don’t know how to make pizza. It’s always far to thin crusted and greasy without being either particularly cheesy or particularly good. Paris pizza was amazing, closer to what I’ve had in Italy than what I’ve had in New York, fresh dough and cheese with just the right ratio of cheese to sauce. Mmmm, pizza.
Refreshed from dinner we decided to go poke around the area. Montmartre is hilly, so we decided to walk in the general direction of “up” so that our return journey would be all downhill. Walking up lead us the foot of a steep staircase to a large church, which turned out to be Sacre Couer.
The area was swarming with tour groups and the like, and we were approached by a group of Senagalaise immigrants who were making friendship bracelets and wanted us to buy them. We got drawn into a conversation, and it ended up being really awkward because we didn’t want the bracelets and they got angry with us. We fled up the stairs to the church (note to self, the next time you flee don’t flee up a steep flight of stairs), and were rewarded with an amazing view of Paris in the nighttime.
After that we continued to wander for a bit, and ended up in front of the Moulin Rouge, as in the Toulouse Lautrec Moulin Rouge. It was one of the things I had heard about in text books and guide books and bang, we just wandered into it. Seeing the Moulin Rouge was neat, but the area was a little seedy. It was surrounded by sex shops and peep shows, which combined with the time of night made the area unpleasant for walking (the cat calls felt worse than in Spain, but maybe that was just because I could kind of understand them). We turned off of the main road where area was much nicer, filled with little bars and cafes (the cafes were closed, the bars were open) and cute shops. The streets were narrow and hilly, a lot like French villages you see in movies, and I was overwhelmed simply to be there. It took me weeks before I was comfortable walking around at night in London, but even with the cat calls and the con artists Paris felt so much more like home than London. There’s something about the vibe that Parisians give—more laid back than London without being sloppy. Even their famed snobbery feels comforting to me; the very fact that they take the time to disapprove means that they are at least thinking about you as opposed to simply ignoring you. I would have been content to walk around all night, but it had been a long day on the bus, and we were tired so we headed back to the hotel.
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