Day 6 takes us to France

Nous sommes à Paris! We are in Paris now!

Compared to our days in London, today has been a bit uneventful. This morning we boarded the Eurostar train with our tour group which took us from London to Paris in 2½ hours. I thought it would be more... impressive or even... shiny, I suppose. However, the train itself was sort of dingy. I do look forward to doing a bit more research regarding the Eurostar train but I'll save that for a later date when I'm not on a trip.

At the very least we were in good company! We got table seats and sat near a pair of sisters from Tennessee. Our tour group is so diverse that it's quite lovely getting to know everyone. There are people from all walks of life. Most have done a great deal of traveling but for a few (like Tom) this is their first international/European trip.

Anyways, we jumped ahead an hour and arrived in Paris around 2pm where we met our Paris tour director, Tini. She's so sweet and upbeat! Typically one would have the same tour guide throughout the entire trip. Yet due to some family problems that our planned tour director (Margaret) had, we ended up with two different tour directors.

The drive into Paris showed me just how modernized London is currently. Paris has that rich, antique architecture that I love. There are more streets paved with stone as to there just being plain pavement. And, really, there is just history every where you look -- including our hotel! Although they've updated the inside of our hotel location, they've kept a lot of the character which you can see by way of the bar in the hotel, the windows frames in the rooms, and much more. It's gorgeous while still making us feel comfortable.

Nevertheless, Tom and I are in a new city where we know very little of the language unfortunately. I've to speak some words but French locals seem to just know that you don't speak French. When possible I try to sneak in a 'bonjour' or a 'merci' to the best of my ability.

We did venture outside our hotel once we were settled in around 5pm. Since we have a limited amount of time in Paris and Tom has many more places that we'd both like to see, we decided to go to one place tonight that I wanted to take a picture of: Moulin Rouge. It was on an... interesting street to say the least. No matter though because it gave us the opportunity to explore the opposite side of Paris than what we'll be seeing tomorrow on our guided tour. Plus I found a large clothing store so I got my clothes shopping out of the way (a skirt and two scarves).

I don't imagine us getting as many souvenirs as we got in London if only for the fact that being in a city where you don't speak the language is a tad overwhelming. Hopefully we can enjoy ourselves though! There's a chance that our optional excursion to Giverny might not pan out because only two other people from our tour group signed up for the tour and they need at least 10 people signed up to make it worthwhile to go. :( Granted, it is a 2-3 hour trip one-way but it would still be nice to spend Saturday outside the busy city of Paris.

The good news about our hotel in Paris is that we have free internet access in our room. Alas, it should be much easier to make blog posts and add photos to Facebook. I think we're also planning to not stay out too late at night in Paris as well.

So until next time, au revoir!