Eurotrip: Paris

Are you ready for some epic posts? Since I'm taking the time to write them, I fucking hope so! :)

9/12-Paris, Day1: After a two and a half hour train ride, we arrived in Paris around 4:30 at the Gare du Nord train station a bit bewildered. It was quite busy and it seemed we were right in the middle of a shady or "dodgy" (as the Australians call it) area of town. But Derek's penal GPS system led the way and after 10 minutes of my heavily communicated doubts, we arrived at All Seasons hotel, our home for the next 3 nights. We dubbed it the terminator hotel, since it had this creepy robotic script on everything. The rooms were pretty small, but that's pretty standard for Europe. After a nice shower, we headed down to the lobby at 6 to meet our Contiki tourmates. After meeting our tour manager, Mark who gave us an orientation about everything, we all walked to a nearby hotel for our included dinner which included duck (and I was surprised that I quite liked it!) After dinner, we boarded our tour bus (and met Hans our driver) and took a night city tour of Paris. Wow! I understand why they call it the "City of Lights".. everything is simply beautiful! He let us stop at the Eiffel Tower for some pictures and Derek captured this masterpiece:

I know, our Nikon is f'in awesome. Anyways, we got back to the hotel around 10:30 and a group of us (3 stooges=me,D and G, plus Ryan, Chloe and Kris )decided to walk across the street to this little bar for some drinks. After a couple hours, Kris headed in and we had to walk a drunk Chloe back to her room. Upon returning, we met and sat with the 3 Aussie girls (D, Hayley and Bel) along with Garett. Around 1:30 we decided to call it a night.

9/13-Paris, Day2: We woke up around 7, showered, had breakfast (which basically consisted of cocoa pebbles) and got the coach at 9 to Fragonard Perfumary. After a snooze of a tour, they tried to sell us some expensive perfume which I think everyone declined. Afterward, we caught the coach and got dropped off near the Louvre. The group today was the 3 stooges, Chloe, Matt, Kris, Ryan, Jeera, Flavia and Melanie and we all walked to the louvre to see the Mona Lisa, which is basically overrated (in my opinion) but it was something we said we had to see so now we can say we saw it.

After a very expensive lunch (Paris is insanely expensive by the way!)--Gweed's pathetic excuse for a coke was 8 fucking euro!, the 3 stooges plus Matt walked down the Champs Elyses to the Arch di Triomph (I'm not double checking my spelling, so if I'm butchering these, I apologize!) Now the Arch is surrounded by this crazy roundabout where they say an accident occurs on average every 20 min or something stupid like that. We sat at the Arch for over an hour and NOTHING HAPPENED! Uggggg, disappointment lol. Around 3, we decided to catch the metro back to the hotel.. Wow, our first time on a subway system! I was quite surprised with how clean it was--Paris did have the cleanest metro that we saw in Europe and after a few times, it was quite easy to navigate and use.

That night, we left the hotel at 6 for Moulin Rouge. We got there a bit early so we had a few drinks at O'Sullivans right next door. The show itself was quite fun. I'm really glad we did it. The food was pretty good too. We sat with Chloe, Matt and Kris which the 6 of us would briefly be dubbed as the Lawn Zombies but that story comes here shortly. Anyways, each table got 3 bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne. (Gweed tried wine and LIKED IT!) Needless to say, we were all pretty lit up once the show was over and we headed back to O'Sullivans. The night was filled with more drinking and dancing (and with some people puking) and we discovered Kris' obsession with Cars (the animated movie) and Mater. Around 1, the 5 of us cabbed it back to the hotel. In bed by 1:30 am!
Blogger just fucking deleted my Moulin Rouge picture.. so anyways.. moving on..

9/14-Paris, Day3: we woke up at 7 am, showered, had our cereal and boarded the coach at 9 to head for the Palace at Versailles. This is where Marie Antionette lived. Derek, Gweed, Matt and Kris all had massive hangovers so we decided to skip the palace tour and walked to the center of town where there was a farmers market. We decided that we wanted to have lunch under the Eiffel Tower so we bought some bread and jam and started to walk back toward the bus. The bread did not make it back to Paris lol. After chilling on the bus with Hans for a bit (Chloe bravely took a train to Versailles and met us), we headed back toward Paris and were dropped off at the Eiffel Tower.

Us minus K went to the very top and it was fucking AWESOME. Soooo glad we did it! Anyways, while waiting for the elevator to get back down, Chloe starts singing this random zombie song, "There's a zombie on your lawn". Long story short, it was a long standing joke that carried for the rest of the tour and thus why our little clique was called the Lawn Zombies.

Afterward, we caught the metro to Galleries Lafayette, a huge shopping mall. After the boys and I discovered it only contained designer clothing (a Marc Jacobs peacoat was 4500 euro!), we walked to a nearby cafe and just chilled and waited for the girls.

At 6:30, we caught the metro to the Latin Quarter and bought some sovenirs and took some pictures outside Notre Dame.

After a rude frenchie refused to let me use the restroom (even after my offer to pay!) we walked to a quaint little pizzeria and and ate pizza for dinner. We headed back to the hotel around 8:30 where I tried to use Chloe's laptop to check Facebook but the wifi was not working :( Our decision to not bring our phones was killing us. We spent the rest of the night packing and gearing up for Amsterdam!