Paris-1 Thomas-0

You win some, you Louvre some. Although I guess it says a lot about me that I’m losing to France… So we booked our hotel for Paris for three nights, but the night before we arrived I found out the so called hotel was not very close to Paris. It was about 30 km away. Needless to say this was bad news. After hours of researching I determined it wouldn’t be too bad since there was some kind of train that went along our hotel that was free with our Eurail pass. Yeah, I thought it would be easy…

After an hour train ride from Paris to our hotel on the outskirts of Longjumeau, address miscommunications, and another hour of walking around a French village, we arrived at our hotel. Hotel Premiere Class. This leads me to a mathematical equation I recently discovered: the actually quality of a hotel is inversely related to the amount of quality they advertise. For you long time readers, you might recall a little hotel in India named Hotel Perfect. This hotel also proves my theory.

To be fair, Hotel Premiere Class wasn’t ALL that bad. The room was very cramped, but the people there were extremely nice. It was just a shame about the location. Our first night in the city of love, Blaine and I decided to climb the Eiffel Tower (671 steps, and an elevator the rest of the way. Yes, I counted) and stayed up there until closing. Unfortunately, the train back to Longjumeau closed at midnight and we arrived at the station at 12:15. So a word of advice to everyone out there, if you’re staying at some odd place on the outskirts of where you want to be, make sure you check to see you have reliable transportation back. We ended up taking a metro as far south as we could, and then caught a 40 Euro cab ride back. Just to give you another idea of how hideously far away this place was, we had a map of Paris and the surrounding region, and Longjumeau was not even close to being on the map.

On our third night in the city of lights, we decided to provide ourselves with extra time to get back to Longjumeau. We got to the station around 11pm, only to find out that the railway company was having a strike that day, and no other trains were going to Longjumeau that day. Luckily, one employee was frantically working and told us about a bus we had to take. We didn’t get back to the hotel till 2am. Sorry, that’ll be my last complaint for a while.

I have to admit, Paris did have some beautiful things. The Eiffel tower is incredible at sunset, as is the Arch de Triumphe, the Louvre (the sculpture exhibit is INCREDIBLE), Notre Dame, St. Michael, the catacombs, and so many more historically-rich destinations. The only problem for Blaine and I was that we didn’t know practically anything about the history of anything…

I must say I was pretty impressed with the food and wine. Easily the best croissant I’ve ever had was from a grocery store in Longjumeau. It was so flaky, buttery, and light… and only 0.60 Euros each. On a few occasions Blaine and I purchased some cheese, a baguette, and a bottle of wine and went to eat it on some garden somewhere, such as the Luxembourg Palace. I can only imagine Paris is a much better place with somebody of the opposite gender.

Well, the day finally came to leave Paris. We were excited to get out of Longjumeau and move on to Zurich, Switzerland, where Blaine had a friend we were going to meet up with. After accidentally waking up 5 minutes before check out, we discovered on our hour train ride into the city that when we had booked our train tickets a few days earlier, the lady had actually booked us for that day, even though we repeated so many times that we weren’t leaving for a few days. Frantic, we went to the train station, hoping to find something that went to Zurich. Luckily we found something, but it arrived 20 minutes later than the other one (this would put our arrival into Zurich at 12:30am). This was pretty late to meet up with Blaine’s friend, especially since he lived a bit outside of Zurich, but he said he was in the city and didn’t mind. Well, our first train is about 20 minutes late, and we miss our connecting train in Geneva. We have to wait another hour for one to come in, and we arrive in Zurich after 2am. We told Kevin (Blaine’s friend) to not bother waiting for us because we didn’t want to be a hassle. With no place to sleep, we arrive in Zurich at 2am…

More to come!