Sunday, April 3, 2016

Bonjour de Paris!

BONJOUR!
...and that's still the extent of my knowledge of the French language! :p

          Travel Buddies!                                 Just miming around!  

One of the greatest perks to living in Europe is that travel is at the tip of your fingers.
Living in Colorado, a weekend getaway usually means going staying in Colorado, going to the mountains or a nearby city like CO Springs or Denver, or maybe Wyoming if there's something to do there.  Since Germany borders nine countries and trains/buses/flights (s/o to Ryan Air!) are as cheap as your lunch, a weekend trip out of Berlin could land you almost anywhere in the EU. So I decided to take advantage of Easter weekend and go to Paris.

This trip definitely served as a lesson on flexibility while traveling...

Originally, the plan was to fly into Brussels and spend some time there before taking an hour long train to Paris. However, three days before our departure, the unexpected happened. Brussels was struck by a terrorist attack taking the lives of many innocent people. It was another tragic moment that shook up Europe and an unfortunate wake up to the reality we're facing here. With that said, precautions must be taken, though we shouldn't be living our lives in fear. Therefore we decided to continue with our trip, but to alter it so that we were just going to Paris. It was too soon and didn't feel right to go to Brussels when they were still grieving. 

                                      So Paris...

Paris took me by surprise. It was never a city I had a great amount of interest in visiting. It seemed like an essential city to visit, check off the list" and never return, but I was proven wrong. There's so much history, culture, and an abundance of museums and things to see and do that I will 100% return. 

Here's a few things I explored while getting a taste of Paris.


The "Must Sees" including the Arc de Triumph, Norte Dame, and the Eifel Tower. The best comment made at the top of the Eifel Tower about the view was "You can't see the Eifel Tower in the skyline when you're on the Eifel Tower. What an astute remark...
The view from the Eifel Tower


Mom- I went to museums! Be proud! Although we didn't make it in the Lourve and see the Mona Lisa (4 hour wait), we went to Musee d'Orsay, another famous art museum and saw a lot of pieces from Rousseau, Monet, and Van Gough. 

                                                                 Anyone hungry?


Not pictured: the best food I had in Paris. We had a picnic with baguette, cheese, Salamis, fruit, and wine. It was heavenly!

Cathedrals Galore



We went to Montemarte, where several famous artists, writers and musicians lived. One of the greatest parts of traveling is connecting what you learn in school to reality. It's the better form of a textbook! 

Another unique experience in this part of town was stumbling upon Sacre-Coer and going to Easter mass there. Going to a service in such a landmark was a truly unique. The echoes carried through the entire building, amplifying the beauty of the organ playing or nuns singing. It gave me goose bumps! 




Another aspect that makes traveling so great are the people you meet and the memories you make with them...Initially, I planned on going to Paris with friends from Berlin, but plans changed at the last minute. I didn't want to cancel the trip and stay in Berlin on a prime weekend to travel so I reached out. One travel buddy was Mattias, an exchange student from my high school that I met at a German language retreat. We didn't really know each other well, but both wanted to travel and thus we met up in Paris. From there we made friends with other people in our hostel and explored the city with them. We were an international mix from the US, Germany, Finland, Canada, Brasil and India. We met each other in a chain reaction of random events, but we all bonded because we all shared a common passion- travel. That and the fact that we were all students traveling on a budget... 

We visited Versailles! Too bad the closed the inside for the day to film a movie... :(

Spring in Europe- one minute it's monsoon raining, the next, it's sunny and clear skies. It's even more unpredictable than Colorado!  (The pics above were all shot with 15 minutes between each other)


Those are some of the memories from the trip! I'm glad we pulled the trip off. Paris- I'll be back again!

In the meantime, here's some other pics:



















No comments:

Post a Comment