Fall Break: Paris

So we Arrived in Paris at 9 am as scheduled, but we ran into a few problems after that. First, we had to go to a different station to buy a train ticket to Brussels, our next stop. Once we finally made it to the other station, which is absolutely enormous, we were shocked to find that the reservation fee for the train was about 5 times as much as promised. Once we swallowed another huge fee, we paid more money to lock our luggage at the train station. Paris we quickly learned, is enormously expensive. However, it's geographical location in Europe makes in an international hub so going to Paris was literally unavoidable.

Don't get me wrong, even though Paris sucked us dry of money, we still had a great time. We did another round of rapid fire sightseeing, and I feel we got to see just enough of each landmark. We went to the Eiffel tower first, for some obligatory tourist pictures, and it was worth it. The tower is enormous, much larger than I expected; it looks like it could be as tall as the average New York skyscraper. In fact, here it is:

That's me doing one of the most touristy things you can possibly do in Europe; next to acting like you are pushing over the leaning tower of Pisa, which I also plan to do. After taking some pictures at the tower, we walked around and made our way to a plaza in front of a French government building, which is actually where I took the picture above. The whole area around the tower is essentially nothing but open space and a government building. It actually seems like a pretty big waste of space, but hey, I guess making good use of space is just another thing the French are bad at doing. After some more walking we hoped onto our next stop, the Arc De Triomphe

The arch is huge as well; it commemorates the fallen French soldiers of WWI, and it's definitely worth seeing. It had names of hundreds of french soldiers carved onto a majority of the inner surface area, so you have to be right under the arch to see a lot of it. There is also a memorial to fallen French soldiers who were never identified. Check it out:

Our final stop in Paris was of course, the louvre. By this point, our rapid fire sightseeing consisted of sprinting through subway system/ streets of France to see the Louvre and get back to the train station in time for our train to Brussels. We succeeded, but we didn't actually have time to go inside the Louvre. We just took pictures of the pyramid things out front, and looked trough the glass at the suckers who don't realize that the Mona Lisa is actually really small and uninteresting. Even though I never made it inside the Louvre we had fun running around Paris; it was just like we were contestants in the amazing race. I will have to go back, because, despite my comment about the Mona Lisa, the Louvre is supposed to be one of the most amazing museums in the world. I guess as soon as I can afford one of the cars parked outside of the Monte Carlo Casino, I can afford to go back to France and actually go into the Louvre.

I should note that the metro (subway) system in France is excellent. It is, like everything else, very expensive, but it's super efficient and makes getting around very easy. We are also traveling with someone who is studying in France, and without those factors, I doubt we would have been able to see everything that we did in just a few hours. Also, despite the money we spent, our whole morning in Paris was due to the eurail giving us flexibly to change plans on the fly. Once we realized we had transfer trains in Paris on the way to brussels, we figured why not hang out in Paris for a bit? I'm not sure I would ever use the eurail again, but the flexibility was nice to have.

Overall, I liked the sights in Paris, but it's so prohibitively expensive it's almost not worth it. In addition, the people are generally rude and do not like to help tourists. It's as if they have something against Americans, like we're exerting our military and diplomatic might on the world for our own benefit or something. Whatever the reason, we saw Paris in 3 hours and I'm glad we did.