The whole trip to Paris started on Thursday afternoon. I met B at the main station in Kassel and while I got my ticket from the machine, B told me that he had forgotten his Bahncard (a special ticket that gives you 50% reduction on all train rides). Since it would have turned out quite expensive without the Bahncard I told him to RUN home and get it. However, the problem was that he had to cover a lot of ground to get back home and had only 22 minutes. I seriously didn't think that he would make it back before the train left. But at 4.46 pm (the exact times the train was supposed to leave) I saw B coming around the corner and I started running for the train. Thanks to the German trains which are usually 3-5 minutes late, we made it. Of course, there were also later trains we could have taken if B wouldn't have made it back. But I'm German and like to plan things ahead and I wanted a time cushion, so that in Hannover we had enough time to find the bus that would bring us to Paris.
After 10 hours in the uncomfortable bus where you barely were able to sleep because the aircondition was definitely too cold and there wasn't enough space for my legs, we finally arrived in Paris at around 8.30 am and it was very rainy!
But nonetheless, we went up to the Basilique du Sacrè-Coeur and got so wet that my new hair dryer was misused to get my hat dry again.
Although I knew beforehand that the hotel we were to stay in was simple and cheap, the room still surprised me in the negative sense. It was small, old and also not very clean. And which I disliked the most was the saying of our tour guide who commented on the rule of not eating inside the rooms: "If you eat, you'll get eaten." I'm really not a huge fan of coakroaches, but while we were there, we didn't get to see any, fortunately. However, for one night the hotel room was OK. Unfortunately, the hotel was located in the north of the city which is full of pickpockets and other weird people. But the good thing about the loaction was that it gave us the option of walking to all the sights and instead of having to take the Metro where you can't see anything of the outside world.
But overall the city looked pretty dirty. It seems to be typical to just throw the trash into the gutters which is cleaned away every night.
I always said that I would go up the Eiffeltower when I'm in Paris. But once we stood in front of it, I realized how ugly it really is and I suddenly could understand why most Parisiens don't like it. So, we decided to not spend a lot of money to go to the top and just took pictures with it in the background where it doesn't look so ugly.
Fortunately, B can read maps and he was the navigator for the whole time we were in Paris. My orientation is terrible and I would have gotten lost all the time without him.
Some interesting things we saw in Paris were the mini-gas station you have in the middle of the street and the way two Smart cars park.
Of course, we also visited the Panthèon of Paris, Notre Dame and a building with a very shiny, golden roof (If I only knew the name! ... Oh, I just looked it up: it's the church of Les Invalides where Napoleon is burried.).
At the end of the day we ended up going to the Louvre which is free for young people between 18 to 26 after 6 pm on Fridays. The only problem was that I, of course, hadn't taken my ID with me because I was afraid that somebody could steal it. However, while B's passport got checked I simply slipped by and nobody realized that they haven't seen my ID or ticket. Of course, taking pictures is strongly forbidden in the Louvre, but I and about 90% of the other visitors ignored this rule and that's why I took a picture of the Mona Lisa anyway. But this pianting was the only one which was behind such a glas box, so that the flashes of some camera users wouldn't bleach/destroy it and it was sealed off, so that one couldn't even get close to it. And it was much smaller than I had imagined it!!! After seeing most of the most important art in the Louvre (like the Mona Lisa and the Milo of Venus) we realized that it is much harder to get out of the Louvre than to get in. Although they had exit-signs everywhere, we couldn't find it for another 45 minutes.
All in all, we probably walked 14 km that day and were already ready to go to bed at 9.30 pm.
Fortunately, our bus was 5 minutes late anyway, so we weren't really that late.
When we arrived at the palace I was a bit dissappointed because I thought that it would look a little fancier from the outside. But we paid 16€ entrance fee anyway to go inside and the dissappointment stopped because from the inside it's all fancy with lots of gold!
The hall of mirrors was the most amazing place in the palace because I really like mirrors and they had like 17 huge ones in there!!!
Then we tok a stroll through the gardens and were glad to be back in the bus by noon because although it wasn't rainy that day, it was pretty cold.
Back in Paris, we decided to climb 284 steps up to the Arc de Triomphe where we could make same awesome pictures.
After a long metro ride to the Basilique de St. Denis, we went back to the Louvre and took some pictures of its outside in daylight and then had our most expensive coffee ever inside. But although my little espresso was 2,80€ it was probably the best espresso I ever had.
Since we've already seen most of the things the day before and our feet were still hurting, we decided to waste some time in the mall of the Louvre. That is also were you can see the two pyramids which are so famous from the movie "The Da Vinci Code".
Taking pictures of the Eiffeltower at night is quite a task because every half an hour or so it starts flashing like a Christmas tree and the camera can't focus. And of course, that flashing makes it even more out of place in Paris!
Unfortunately, at about 8 pm that day I started feeling quite bad; I had a stomach ache and felt a bit sick. I guess I shouldn't have drank the tap water in our simple hotel. So, while B had a great cheese salat in one of the bars I chewed on a little sandwich. By leaving time (around 11.30 pm) I was really sick and was shacking so much that B had to take the pictures for me.
