Study Abroad in Europe! : Paris!

We arrived in Paris Thursday afternoon. We took a high speed train here and once we got into the station had to figure out the metro system....there were SO many different lines and routes, plus no one spoke English to help us. We made our way to our stop where we were meeting the next person for our place to stay. The apartment was really neat! We had a view of the Eiffel Tower out of all our windows. Night one we had crepes for dinner and then went and saw the Eiffel Tower. It was about a 10 min walk from our place and it was beautiful!!!

We woke up really early to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower day 2 and we were one of the first 100 people in line, which is really good! It was supposed to open at 9 but they said there was a delay bc of a broken lift. We continued to wait and wait and eventually we found out that the security guards went on strike and were not working. We had already waited so long that we didn't want to leave so we just hoped they would open soon. There was a meeting and they said they would announce what would happen at 12. When that happened they said they had another meeting planned for 2. We had ready waited almost 4 hours and decided to leave. It was a bummer.

So next we took the metro and went and saw Notre Dame. They was a huge line to go inside and at this point we were so over lines we decided to just walk around it. The details on the building were so cool! We got lunch and then went back to our apartment and relaxed. I ordered pasta and it was AMAZING!

For dinner we went to a local place because our apartment was in a residential neighborhood right outside city center. We watched the World Cup game because Netherlands were playing and when the US isn't playing we decided that's our new team because that's where we live! Haha they ended up beating Spain (who is ranked #1) and it was fun because we went to a crepe bar/restaurant to watch the game.

We had to be out of our place by 9:00 am and were planning to catch the train to Brussels at 10:00. Well....when we got there some of the train stations employees went on strike so everyone was changing their tickets. When we got to the window everything was sold out...the earliest they could offer us was 3:45 to a different city. Instead, we just got on a suburban train, and were going to have 5 stops, taking us almost 6 hours! On train 1 there was a technical delay which made us late and miss all our other connections. So at every stop we had to re route. It was SUCH a long day..our way there took us 1.5 hours but back to Belgium took us almost 14!!!

Overall, I did not really like Paris as much as I thought I would plus we did not have very good luck! Although the Eiffel Tower was worth the trip itself...the people were really rude, no one spoke English and it was really dirty. I expected it to be much different but I'm glad we came because I loved the Eiffel Tower!!!

View from our apartment!