pain au chocolat and other reasons i liked paris

we arrived in paris via a night bus from utrecht, netherlands. the savings of taking a bus vs. a train plus the advantage of not paying for accommodations seemed too great to pass up. i have to wonder if monetary savings ever actually benefit travelers' sanity, comfort or general well-being. six hours on a bus, in the middle of the night may have been the cheapest option but it cost me 3 days of a cold & flu, a day of sightseeing spent exhausted & catching up on sleep and the pain & suffering we had to endure while other sleeping passengers let 'er rip.

onto the good stuff...

we met some really fantastic people while we were in paris. most of them were spanish friends of our couchsurfing host veronica but that doesn't mean there aren't friendly parisians, we just didn't meet many. our first night veronica took us to a party at jose's flat. on the weekend we went to fontainebleau with some of the same people...sonja, teresa, andrew (he's a cdn from toronto not spanish), jose, and miguel.

a quick lesson in boating with our new friend jose acting as translator.

the highlight of our trip to fontainebleau was the opportunity to try boating on the canal. some of us were more eager to try than others but we all took our turn eventually. jay and i were in the last group to go. jay kept saying, "i'm gonna fall in" and we all assured him that he wouldn't. well, you can guess what happened. shirt, pants, hat and wallet...ass over tea kettle...

after the fall

on our last night in town we got to meet our san francisco blog buddies, alison & ron of 'leap...and the net' fame. we met on couchsurfing and had hoped to meet in san fran when we were there in march for evan & mary's wedding and never did. so it'd been a long courtship of reading each others blog posts and exchanging emails before the inevitable first date. we over paid for our french onion soup and got dirty looks in the bar-where-you-must-wear-black but i feel confident that we'll get a second date...

alison & ron from san francisco

of course we did some obligatory touristy things like visit the eiffel tower, arc de triomphe, and the louvre. but we also did some bonified parisian things like carry a baguette home from the bakery, avoid dog poo on the sidewalk and sat in the park on sunday afternoon eating the aforementioned baguette.

arc de triomphe

eiffel tower right up the guts

notre dame front facade

notre dame gargoyles

the famous louvre pyramid

jason trying to get kicked out of the louvre but they make it pretty hard to do...flash photos, people hugging statues and lax ticket checking. how very french.

next post: how we missed our train to bordeaux and other french delights ;p

salut,
corina