Weekend in Paris! Day 1

So, I know it's been forever and a half since I wrote last, but I've been doing exciting things, I promise!

I went to Paris on Thursday March 4th and came back to London on Sunday morning March 7th. There were 5 of us that went.

After walking around for 2 hours to find a hostel, we finally settled on one called the Centre International (or something) in the Latin Quarter near the Notre Dame.

Yes, a hostel. We survived!!! It was a room that slept 10 people. It had one room with 2 sets of bunk beds and then a little sink and shower with no curtain and then an open doorway to the next part of the room that had 3 sets of bunk beds. We had 1 roommate the first two nights, an older woman from Nice, France, and then the last night we had the rest of the beds filled. It was kinda sketchy, but we lived! I slept in my coat. I didn't want to touch the bed sheets or pillow... who knows what germs were on them. The hostel served breakfast... but we didn't really eat it. They had cereal, juice, coffee/hot chocolate, and bread. First off, the milk was warm, ewwwwwwww. Apparently the French boil their milk or something and it has a longer shelf life than ours AND they don't refrigerate it! To make it worse, one of the girls took a piece of bread out of the basket and there was a huge hairball on it. EWWWW!

We got out of there quick.

ANYWAY, back to the first day when we got to Paris. We took the Eurostar from London King's Cross St. Pancras station to Paris Gare du Nord. We went through the chunnel. We left London on a 5:25am train and arrived in Paris at 9:00am. Definitely an early morning. We met a friend, Emily, at the train station. She is studying in Paris with the Hollins Paris program. She definitely came in handy with translating!! Thank you Emily!! The weather was BEAUTIFUL and sunny, but a little bit cold. We were so hungry, so we decided to eat at a cafe. We sat down and the waiter tried to take our orders, but he wasn't understanding us. Then a customer came over and he spoke a little bit of English and was trying to tell the waiter what we wanted but I'm pretty sure no one know what anyone was saying. Our waiter left us and then a waitress came by and we tried to tell her all that we wanted was soup. She kept saying "impossible!" (in french) and we were like why??? Then she snatched our menus out of our hands and EVERYONE was staring at us. I just started laughing in embarrassment and we left to find our hostel.

After we dropped our stuff into the lockers at the hostel, we walked by the Notre Dame a block and a half away from our hostel, took pictures then went inside. It was really pretty! Then we walked along the river to the Jardins des Tuileries which is a garden that Emily said is her favorite. There was a little pond with ducks and lots of people sitting around the pond. We got our first french crepe with nutella at a crepe stand. It was DELICIOUS!!! Then we walked ALL the way to the Eiffel Tower. We stopped at a wine store and picked up a bottle of red wine and then picked up a loaf of french bread and sipped on wine and ate bread on a bench while we looked at the tower. So lovely :)

We walked around for a bit more and then found a pizza place to eat at because we didn't want to test our luck again on a french one and get kicked out again!! hahaha

We took the bus back to our hostel after a very long day and slept SO nicely. I slept in my coat. haha. But I was SO tired and I slept great :)