Day 2: Bonjour from Paris
Mostly uneventful first flight from SFO to Toronto. Watched Date Night… I guess it was funny, but mostly because I was half-asleep, and trying really hard to stay up until it was 10pm Paris time. Then I completely zoinked out the rest of the flight. Groggy during the turnover in Toronto and when we got on the flight for Paris… I think waking up in the middle threw me off, because I was on & off sleeping for the 2nd flight. :\ Lots of turbulence, too. And they fed us CRAP FOOD at odd hours D: I mean really, airplane food is always horrible, but is it really possible to make a cookie inedible? And they group “vegetarian” with “vegan” so for “breakfast” we got a vegan bagel, which was nasty. hahaha. We fooled them into giving us regular banana muffins by hiding our trash from the bagels… haha. :)
Arrived at the Charles de Gaulle airport at around 9:30am. Even though the temperature here is about the same as the Bay Area, it’s a lot more humid. Managed to get ourselves to our hotel via shuttle without losing any of our luggage along the way. :P
Our hotel is very quaint, but in a good way. The “lift” (aka elevator) only fits 1 or 2 people, but luckily our room is on the first floor. Regular ol’ keys too rather than fancy hotel room cards. :P The street our hotel is on is super quiet, and our room faces a courtyard in the center of the hotel. It’s nice :)
Funny story: We blew the power out of 3 floors of the hotel by attempting to plug in a power strip to the power adapter. ahahaha. Luckily the hotel people were really nice about it and could fix the problem quickly… but… now I’m a little apprehensive of plugging anything in. Haha. o_o
Underestimated how tired I was, and zoinked out for another 4 hours. Woke up at around 5pm and we decided to go out and explore the area around our hotel and have dinner. The Arc de Triomphe is a few blocks from our hotel. You can’t really appreciate how amazing it is through photos… it’s GIGANTIC. We’re going to go to the top another day, once we get our museum passes.
Walked down the Avenue de Champs-Élysées, distinguished by its horse-chestnut trees. Sooo crowded with tourists (huge contrast to the street where our hotel is) and lined with cafés and chain stores. Kind of like Paris’s version of Union Square. We ate dinner at one of the indoor/outdoor restaurants, where the main restaurant is in a building and the outdoor seating is right along the street. The waiters have to carry the food through the crowds on the sidewalk to get to the outdoor area… kind of precarious!
It started raining when we were heading back to our hotel. Not pouring rain, but annoying enough… my mom calls it “pissing rain.” hahaha. We’ve been at our hotel since then. 12:30am… I should get to sleep :)
