parigi

11/13-16
It’s my birthday weekend! And I got to choose wherever we went. Despite the temptations of wanting to go somewhere new, I had to choose Paris as my birthday destination, just because I love it too much not to. Plus I was only there for a couple of days the first time so I could already think of tons of other things to do. I was so excited, had everything ready and we made it to the airport with time to spare on Thursday night. When we got there an Alitalia rep gave us our boarding passes and we realized that they were for a different flight than our original one. She said that our original (later) flight had been cancelled so they bumped us onto the earlier flight, leaving in like 30 minutes, so we would need to run to the gate now. We got through security and rushed to the gate to find a mass of people all crowded around one Air France rep. We couldn’t hear what he was saying but heard other people around us saying that the flight was cancelled. The rep promptly left, leaving tons of people not knowing what was going on, so we followed him to try and get an explanation. He told us that this flight was also cancelled and that we should go get rebooked at the Alitalia service desk. We walked that way, and ran into some friends going to Amsterdam, whose flight was not cancelled, and waited in line to be told that both flights were cancelled due to a strike (of course) but that there would also be a different strike starting the next day, meaning that getting to Paris would practically be impossible that weekend, and definitely wouldn’t be happening that night. I was so upset, especially after I paid extra to switch our tickets to Thursday! All I wanted was to be in Paris at midnight for my 21st birthday. And the reps weren’t so helpful, they only gave us reasons for cancellations after I practically forced it out of them, and told us there was a hotel we could stay in but gave us almost no details. The next couple of hours were spent wandering around the airport (looking for other flights/train options) and sitting outside (with a million other pissed off passengers) waiting for a bus to this hotel. The bus was really late because there had been bad rain all day which had apparently caused lots of accidents in the area. The bus ride, which was supposed to take 15 minutes, took almost an hour, and the bus was packed, with people standing in the aisle because it was supposed to come more often than it did. We got to the hotel close to midnight and had to get up for our new flight in all of 5 hours. So we tried to go to bed. We got up the next morning and had just missed the first bus at 6 am, which we needed to take since our check in closed around 6:30. Even though we had our boarding passes, we had a bag we needed to check. We took the next bus and got to the airport a little late, and they wouldn’t let us check the bag, which had big liquids in it. We asked if we could carry it on and they said fine, so we shoved as many things as we could in little Ziploc bags and rushed through security. Carla didn’t even take her laptop out of her bag and they didn’t even care. The only liquid they made us throw out was a big hair mousse. We got to the gate and onto the plane (which surprisingly enough had a working crew.. a representative the night before said she would be surprised if this flight took off) and we pushed back almost right after we sat down. We made it to Paris, took a train and metro to our hostel, dropped off our stuff and then set out on our jam packed, whirl wind tour of Paris - we managed to cram everything we wanted to see in two full days into one and a half! Since our hostel was in the Latin quarter (on a really cute street) we started off there, and walked around to see the Pantheon, St. Etienne du Mont church, walked through the Jardin du Luxembourg and ended up at Rue Christine! My street! Everything on the street was named Christine something. How cool! After that we crossed the river to Notre Dame, went inside Sainte Chapelle (new for me) with its impressive stained glass windows, walked by the Louvre and the Jardin des Tuilleries on our way to see the Garnier Opera house and the Galleries Lafayette. We climed up to the top just as they were closing it, and despite the cloudy, misty weather and the darkness, we could still see the (currently blue) lit up Eiffel tower in the distance. Then we metro-ed back to the Louvre, which has free entrance on Friday nights for people under 26, and attempted to stay awake in the biggest art museum ever. Everything in the Louvre is amazing but we were so tired that it was not the best time for us to appreciate it. Still we hit up the major works of art, Mona Lisa, Nike of Samothrace etc, and when we left decided to find a cake somewhere and go eat it under the Eiffel tower. The tricky thing about the Eiffel tower is that you can see it from like everywhere in Paris, so sometimes it looks a lot closer than it is. Long story short, we walked forever to get to the Eiffel tower, and it was so late that most groceries (and everything else) were closed. We found some little random one open and bought a little cake thing and continued our walk to the Eiffel tower. We stuck around to see it sparkle and then headed back to our hostel to sleep! The next day we started off by going to Sacre Coeur and then walking to Moulin Rouge. Then we took the metro to the arc de Triomphe and decided to walk up a million stairs to the top, which had great views. Then we walked down the Champs-Elysees and took the metro to the Eiffel Tower to get some day time pictures from a different view point. Then it was off the Musee d’Orsay, which was a great impressionist art museum that I had always wanted to go to. After that we decided that since it was our last night we needed to go see the Eiffel tower light up again, so we went back there. I should probably mention some of the great food we had this trip as well – crepes, baguettes, cheese, butter.. all my favorites! We returned to the hostel ready to go to bed since we had at like 7:30 in the morning. We decided to take the metro right when it opened to the train to Orly airport, but for many reasons combined we were running late and arrived to the airport 2 minutes after the check in closed – and they wouldn’t let us check in. We could not believe our luck! We asked about getting onto another flight to Rome, it would be 50 euro, but there wasn’t one until tomorrow. Well that wouldn’t work since we all had class, so our options became standby on one of the full flights to Rome that day or buy a flight for a different location. Since we would have to buy the ticket all over again anyways, we researched our options on the internet but didn’t find anything from our airport that was better or cheaper. So in the end, we bought a new flight to Pisa, leaving at 2 pm (7 hours in the airport!) for 185 euro and then once we got to Pisa bought a train ticket for 40 euro to Viterbo (which lasted another 5 hours). So we got home at 10:30 pm when we were supposed to be home around noon, but we were just happy to have made it.