There we are. The two of us in the car. Packed with more than we probably need, ready to go to Paris. Mom will drive the first bit, and somewhere in the middle I will take over. I guess she'll do the driving in Paris again, as I haven't driven very far yet. I don't really know what France is like, so I'll probably get a little nervous. However, I'm proud that we're going to do this together!
I'm excited, just as I am a little nervous. It's something completely new. Going on a city trip, just the two of us. I've made a schedule which we can use, including the pathways we can take. So many things to see, so little time. I don't doubt the fact that we are going to have fun in the city of light. I'all let you know more soon!
Day 1 is now done and the first thing I'd like to say is: I'm very tired. We arrived at half past 2 pm. Finding a place to park our car was harder than it seemed and therefore we drove around for half an hour. Finally, we decided to go for a parking spot which we knew was nearby. So after all these hours of driving and searching the city, you could easily see my eyes falling down sometimes. However, we did have a schedule so we wanted to do those things anyway.
On the internet I saw stunning pictures of Gare du Nord, one of the train stations. I had planned to go up there and see it for myself. So there we went, off to see the first bits of the city. It wasn't quite hard to find and we also took a look at Gard du l'Est. both really nice and big, but they didn't totally manage to get me stunned. Somehow the picture was far better.
Luckily for us, we also had Parc des Buttes Chaumont on our schedule. It was supposed to be a big park in the 19th arrondissement (one of the districts in Paris) where mainly locals were coming. It was quite a bit of a walk and on our way there it was really crowdy and noisy. So you can imagine my mom and I were kind of going crazy. Finally we found the park and it was absolutely lovely. You can see green coming at you from meters away and it just attracted me so much. It contains some kind of water and a lot of pathways, going up and down quite much. It's mainly locals who come here so I was basically the only one with a camera in my hand. We loved to walk around here some time and it gave us some time to clear our minds.
Actually, I hadn't planned anything else for the day, but as it was such beautiful weather we wanted to spend the evening in the middle of the city. We bought a ticket for the subway and after a lot of French-English talking we found were we had to go and which subways we had to take. Halfway through however, we had to get out of the train because it wouldn't ride anymore. We got out and decided we'd travelled enough for the day, so we sat down at a bistro down the road and ate this small menu and a coke to get some energy. It was delicious (also because I was hungry probably) and the waiter was very kind to us. Not much later we went back to the hotel and that's where we are right now. Let's go to sleep and see what tomorrow may bring us!