The Paris Adventure

I definitely learned a lot of things this weekend. For starters, before you leave for a trip, it is important to check for more things other than just your passport. My friend Cassandra and I went to Paris and while we were on the train there, realized we left all the directions to the hotel we were staying in back at the guest house. We also had no idea what the hotel was called. Luckily, I managed to remember the subway stop, and we stumbled upon a sketchy, sketchy internet cafe. To make matters worse, Cassandra couldn't access her e-mail to get the reservation, so this turned into a google search until we found the hotel that looked familiar.  Once we figured that all out, we got to the hotel, and then promptly left to go to the louvre. That was definitely the best part of the trip! After that, we had dinner at this great restaurant that gave you free olives. Just my place. Once we got back to the hotel we decided to take showers. Great idea, right? Wrong. The shower didn't work so we had to "shower" in the faucet. On Saturday, we spent the morning seeing the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysee. We tried to rent some bikes but had some credit card trouble. In the afternoon we decided to bite the bullet and pay the 10 euros we didn't want to pay to reserve a seat on the high speed train. No such luck. The lady there said that all of the trains were full, then she somehow managed to find an open train that left at 8 am on Sunday that was basically a tour de europe. The thing took 7 hours and went all the way up to Brussels, and then back down to Southern Germany. The worst part: it wasn't 10 euros, it was 32. We decided to make the best out of the crappy situation though and spend the day in Koeln, where our connection was, and get on a train later in the day. Once we got the train fiasco straightened out, we went to Notre Dame. After that we had coffee in the "Quasimodo Cafe" where we got money stolen from us by the waiter while we were counting it out for the bill. The french are so nice. Once we were done in that area, we had dinner at the worst pasta place ever. It was basically the McDonalds of pasta and was pretty friggen terrible. To conclude the day, we went and saw the Eiffel Tower at night and watched it sparkle. What a day. It was really fun being in Paris, despite all the things that went wrong. However, I think it's definitely one of those things you do once and then you're good.