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Okay... I really don't know where to start this. (This is mostly a way to keep myself awake past 9:00 here. I feel like I've been up since Friday morning at 5. Which... I sort of have, if you don't count the three and a half hours of half-conscious sleep I got on the airplane).
For those of you uninterested in a wall of text about how many things have tried and continue to try to defeat me, there are pictures! Cliquez ici! Tomorrow's ought to be a little less typical-touristy, but today's aren't too bad.
So, things more or less went like this: I got to the airport way too early, I sat around a lot, I am 25 and still ride in airplanes with my nose squished against the window and make funny faces when my ears pop. I discovered in Montreal and the plane out of Montreal that things can take different amounts of time in French and English (four minutes if you were listening in French, ten in English). Then we arrived in Paris and it was foggy and slightly rainy and the baggage claim kept stopping because things were getting caught and the train didn't exist due to construction and the ticket lady couldn't understand my terrible, broken French (actually, she just couldn't understand my horrible pronunciation of Les Halles, and after that just gave up and used English), they wouldn't take my credit card. If I were a girl of weaker constitution, that would've probably ended things right there, but I managed to get my ticket and find the shuttle (and CDG is a bit of a labyrinth) and take the RER to the city and then transfer to the Metro (I swear the walk from Les Halles to Chatelet, which is the same station in two parts, by the way, was most of the way from the station to my hostel. I could probably travel for years without ever going above ground in this city.)
(As far as the credit cards go, I am now afraid to even try my card because so few places seem to take them. Which puts me in serious danger of running out of cash very quickly. Probably by Wednesday, if I want to eat. In this situation, if I am starving and there is nothing else I can do, I will be picking a fight with a chip-and-pin machine, and I will win. And then flee the country.)
Despite being nearly-starving and generally exhausted, however, today was... well, actually because I'm nearly-starving and generally exhausted, I don't quite know what to make of today. I mean... I'm in Paris. It's gorgeous, and made of nothing but tiny little shops full of fascinating things and it's all old, and remarkably homogeneous, and I walked for three hours straight today without repeating any streets and saw only one Starbucks (and the current ratio of fishmongers to Starbucks, in my observation is 2:1, which is fantabulous). I think my total walking time for today was about five hours, which is insane on so little sleep, but I checked in to the hostel and couldn't go to my room yet, so I started walking and apparently you can't go two blocks here without finding something interesting so I tested the theory and it holds true for pretty much the whole of the 13th and 5th arrondisements, as well as the parts of the 1st, 4th, and 6th that I wandered through. (SUCH a walkable city. I was going to take the metro everywhere, but I walked a good percentage of the city today, so I think I'll probably walk everywhere unless I'm going all the way from one end to another. Also, there are Velib bikes EVERYWHERE and if I had my helmet I'd absolutely be using them... but I cannot, cannot make myself bike in a city I don't know without a helmet, because that's just an incredibly stupid way to die or end up with brain damage. Even though everyone I see on them is helmetless, I refuse to tempt fate like that.)
Notes for the future: All the cafes close before seven. Do not wait until late for dinner. Make sure you have access to cash. Buy a plug adapter so you don't have to worry about running out of batteries for everything.
tl;dr Brain fail from overwhelming city. Will sleep and figure things out later. So far... things are amazing. Also I have not thought about work once, nor do I intend to, even though I forgot to put my out-of-office message up and so should technically be checking my e-mail.
For those of you uninterested in a wall of text about how many things have tried and continue to try to defeat me, there are pictures! Cliquez ici! Tomorrow's ought to be a little less typical-touristy, but today's aren't too bad.
So, things more or less went like this: I got to the airport way too early, I sat around a lot, I am 25 and still ride in airplanes with my nose squished against the window and make funny faces when my ears pop. I discovered in Montreal and the plane out of Montreal that things can take different amounts of time in French and English (four minutes if you were listening in French, ten in English). Then we arrived in Paris and it was foggy and slightly rainy and the baggage claim kept stopping because things were getting caught and the train didn't exist due to construction and the ticket lady couldn't understand my terrible, broken French (actually, she just couldn't understand my horrible pronunciation of Les Halles, and after that just gave up and used English), they wouldn't take my credit card. If I were a girl of weaker constitution, that would've probably ended things right there, but I managed to get my ticket and find the shuttle (and CDG is a bit of a labyrinth) and take the RER to the city and then transfer to the Metro (I swear the walk from Les Halles to Chatelet, which is the same station in two parts, by the way, was most of the way from the station to my hostel. I could probably travel for years without ever going above ground in this city.)
(As far as the credit cards go, I am now afraid to even try my card because so few places seem to take them. Which puts me in serious danger of running out of cash very quickly. Probably by Wednesday, if I want to eat. In this situation, if I am starving and there is nothing else I can do, I will be picking a fight with a chip-and-pin machine, and I will win. And then flee the country.)
Despite being nearly-starving and generally exhausted, however, today was... well, actually because I'm nearly-starving and generally exhausted, I don't quite know what to make of today. I mean... I'm in Paris. It's gorgeous, and made of nothing but tiny little shops full of fascinating things and it's all old, and remarkably homogeneous, and I walked for three hours straight today without repeating any streets and saw only one Starbucks (and the current ratio of fishmongers to Starbucks, in my observation is 2:1, which is fantabulous). I think my total walking time for today was about five hours, which is insane on so little sleep, but I checked in to the hostel and couldn't go to my room yet, so I started walking and apparently you can't go two blocks here without finding something interesting so I tested the theory and it holds true for pretty much the whole of the 13th and 5th arrondisements, as well as the parts of the 1st, 4th, and 6th that I wandered through. (SUCH a walkable city. I was going to take the metro everywhere, but I walked a good percentage of the city today, so I think I'll probably walk everywhere unless I'm going all the way from one end to another. Also, there are Velib bikes EVERYWHERE and if I had my helmet I'd absolutely be using them... but I cannot, cannot make myself bike in a city I don't know without a helmet, because that's just an incredibly stupid way to die or end up with brain damage. Even though everyone I see on them is helmetless, I refuse to tempt fate like that.)
Notes for the future: All the cafes close before seven. Do not wait until late for dinner. Make sure you have access to cash. Buy a plug adapter so you don't have to worry about running out of batteries for everything.
tl;dr Brain fail from overwhelming city. Will sleep and figure things out later. So far... things are amazing. Also I have not thought about work once, nor do I intend to, even though I forgot to put my out-of-office message up and so should technically be checking my e-mail.
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