THE LAST WEEKEND TRIP BEFORE I GO HOME! NOOOOO! I had a lot looking forward to this trip to Paris, and it has been a dream of mine since I was a child. My sister and I always dreamed about going to see it together, but now I can be the tour guide for her when we go back! I was sad to know we would only have ONE DAY to go through the whole city of Paris...so it better make a good impression on me.
For the most part it did. And little Carly wouldn't be too impressed with it as big Carly was, sadly. It was beautiful do not get me wrong, it was just clustered and one of the dirtiest cities we visited. Plus there was a lot of sketchy people there and pick pocketing was a big concern so I didn't like the fact that I was concerned about this and my safety when I could just be enjoying the city and what it has to offer.
Plus, I hate to say it but the French were rude to us. We were already amateur travelers so when we are trying to figure out how to get to our Airbnb or which bus or train to take into the city, we didn't liked getting yelled at by random strangers and also the language gap was hard to go about. But somehow we did it.
It was hot when we arrived in Paris, and we had a long long train ride to our town just outside of Paris, Meudon. This wasn't one of the best Airbnb's or locations I picked before the trip, but you live and you learn. We didn't have any A/C in the Airbnb either (again) so it didn't feel like we were on a great start. By the time we got settled into the place we were exhausted from traveling and decided to call it an early night.
The full second day we had here was solely for hitting all the landmarks. We started our day with a trip into Versailles as we had a 9:00 tour of the Palace of Versailles. But we ended up being late to it as Kallie didn't have her bus tickets and barely any money to purchase a new one so that was the struggle of the day for her and us. But we still made it and got to go on the 10:00 tour (maybe because we skipped the huge line that was outside of it since we were on a time schedule) and got in.
I loved the palace, I was dreaming of going to it since I first learned about it my sophomore year of college. It did not disappoint with its beauty but man it was hard to enjoy it with all the people crowding in all the rooms. We expected it to be busy, but took us by surprise how almost unorganized it was compared to other bigger sites we saw. We still loved it none the less and lasted about and hour and a half or so.
Afterwards we made it into city center and got a map to map out every location we wanted to stop and visit. This was another challenge in itself as all of the public transportation was hard to figure out in Paris and we were all losing our minds a bit because we didn't have any breakfast. During all of our trip to Versailles and the tour and into the city center we only had water and tic tacs to energize us. Talk about tripping on a budget.
We thought we made a pretty good dent in the attraction list - Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, The Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysees, Saint-Germain-de-Pres and more. So to anyone who thinks they can't hit all the attractions in a city in ONE DAY. We prove you wrong.
We spent the evening in the grass under the Eiffel Tower waiting for it to be sundown and watch it light up and twinkle in the night. The relaxing and magical moment was always ruined by people trying to sell us trinkets or booze but once we got our fill, we decided to head back to our Airbnb. Note to self...DO NOT travel an hour out of town to get to your place at MIDNIGHT if you are an inexperienced traveler. This was the worst experience of the trip, as we didn't get back to our place until 2:30 AM and we were terrified to the bone by a gang of dudes near our apartment lofts to the point I called our host to direct us the safe way home. He was super nice and even walked us back. But enough said about that terrifying night. We are safe and made it back.
We had an early morning to travel back to Edinburgh, but Paris was wonderful to say the least. I would go back to gain a better experience and also to travel more into France's countryside.