Friday, August 13, 2010

Catchup: Paris Day One

So before I begin to document this adventure, I want to warn you that this is going to be a lot less detailed than my sister's account. I was not writing while on the road (for once), and now it's been a few months so I am going to be relying on the photos quite a bit! I usually remember a lot while looking at photos, and there are more here than normal so maybe it will turn out alright... but I want to warn you there may be more photos than words. I have around 300 photos of Paris alone, so you can imagine how many pictures there are going to be. I won't post ALL of them this time since there are soooo many... but there will be quite a few.

AHEM. Ok so I got out of the train and found the meeting spot my sister and I had agreed on. I was early, so I started to knit. I was making a sweater for FOX! People would randomly say things to me in French about the knitting, but I coudn't really respond that well. Erin's plane was delayed so she was late to arrive. I didn't mind though since I had more sweater done that way. I was in no rush.

Our parents had booked us a hotel for our stay in Paris (oh la la!) and it was right near the arc du Triumphe. We got out of the underground and boom! There we were!

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Those were actually taken after we left the hotel, but whatever. We got to the place and checked in.. put our stuff away and decided that we had enough energy to walk around the city a bit. I was surprised since we were both sleep deprived (Erin much more so), but off we went!

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We found this little church while we were wandering - totally by accident. It was free to go in!Paris010

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So we kept wandering down the street, no idea where we were going to end up... and we walked right over to the Eiffel Tower. We were doing pretty good considering we didn't even mean to do that!

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found a building covered in greenery... that's Erin at the bottom!


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It was quite a walk, but we made it to a platform that was good for viewing the tower. It had this building here:
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I tried to squish the Eiffel, but it didn't budge
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So I squished Erin instead :p
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Then I licked it...

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The houses were all so fancy and clean. I had heard about Paris being a dirty city but I suppose that's just outside the center...
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Trying to find affordable coffee was proving to be a challenge. I had brought groceries from Berlin on the train ( I knew it would be much more expensive in Paris) but it was definitely time to eat. I was hard to find anything affordable though, so I believe we went to a marketplace near the hotel and had some sort of overpriced food and chocolate cake. We ate it in our lovely hotel:

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Erin was beyond tired so wasn't eating a ton, but still managed to get some food down. We made it an early night to get in some major sightseeing the next day. We were going to go on a Rick Steve's "historical walk". Erin had printed out all this stuff from the internet so we'd try it out the next day!

Catchup: Moving Day

So the next day was moving day...

I was definitely suffering from the night before, and was in no state to be lifting things. I had to anyway though, because we had a truck rented and everything... so off we went.

Moving took a decent amount of time since we were sharing the truck with another couple that was moving into the room next door to the one we were leaving. I was lucky and could rest for most of that, but then we had to move all our stuff up three or four flights of stairs. Not fun.

I was exhausted by the end of it. We had to decided where everything was going, and how we would arrange things. It took a while! We had some bookshelves and things on the balcony, and stuff piled on the bed. The wardrobe was tilted looking cause of the floor, and that freaked me out at first. It was still a massive improvement to where we were before though!

The next days I was preparing for my trip with Erin as well as getting unpacked and settled. My train was on the 5th of May overnight, so I had massage treatments right before. On the day before I left, I went and got my bangs trimmed by Tau, and went to watch some LOST with Floh at Benny's before catching the Ubahn to the train station. I was on the road again:

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FOX was traveling with me overnight :) we relaxed in the train until morning when I was to meet up with my sister!

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