November 13th--Leave for Paris!

   I woke up at 9:30am to get ready and pack for Paris!!! At 10:30am, I made eggs and toast for a late breakfast. I finished watching the episode of Castle that wouldn’t load completely the night before. The internet in the ResHall is so slow, it often loads part of an episode and then won’t load the rest..always around a good part too. Cliffhanger! Haha. I check my e-mails and then packed for Paris. I studied French for 7 years and have never had a chance to speak it or see the places I studied in class. At 2:15pm, I meet Jenny in the lobby of the ResHall to go to her sister, Jessica’s Notre Dame apartment. We took bus 19 right outside the ResHall and arrived at her sister’s flat at 3pm. We chilled in her room before making pepperoni pizza and garlic bread for dinner before leaving for the train station.

   We rode the tube 1 stop to King’s Cross/St. Pancras, where the Eurostar departs from in the St. Pancras International terminal. We arrived at the terminal at 7:15pm, and got our e-tickets. We went through security and passport control before we could reach a terminal waiting area. Our train left at 8:20pm, so we had to wait a little before they allowed us to board the train. We boarded the train, Jenny, Jess, Jess’s friend Margot, and I. I sat next to Margot, with Jenny and Jess in the seats in front of us. We shortly stopped in Calais, before arriving in Paris at Gare du Nord at 11:30pm. We couldn’t figure out the metro and which pass to get, and the guy in the information booth closed down right before we could ask for help. Jerk! So we just took a taxi to our hotel. We told the taxi driver the address of our hotel and we were off. It was funny because he turned on the country radio channel and as we were quietly singing/humming along to Taylor Swift, he started to hum along with us. Hilarious!

   He dropped us off at the address, but it wasn’t our hotel. For some reason, the hotel has an address down the road from them as their address. Weird, but we saw the hotel, Ideal Design Hotel, as we drove past it. We checked into 2 rooms and Jenny and I shared a room. Each floor was decorated differently, which was really neat. The elevator was extremely small (2 person maybe), so we just climbed the spiral stairs to the 7^th floor, which was the highest floor of the hotel. Jenny and I’s room had a large double window that we opened and got a great view from. We took some pictures, talked, and then got ready for bed. We went to bed at 2am super excited that we were in Paris, France!!!

At our hotel in Paris. (L to R) Jenny, me, Jess