We said goodbye to Fred, Isabelle and the chateaux after a very nice leaving present and a packed lunch AND a lift to the train station 30 km away! (you get an idea of how good they were to us) To be completely honest we were not 100% impressed with Paris from our arrival, to us it looked like Manchester only with more balconies on the windows and more French people! We had only seen a small part though after all so we held our judgement until the day after when we could explore a bit more. Our hotel was nice enough considering it was the cheapest one on lastminute.com and we were more appreciative to get there due to the torrential rain that had, by then, soaked us to the bone!
After settling in and drying off in the hotel we decided to go for a wander down some streets considering we only had a couple of days to see as much as possible… it still looked like Manchester… but we hadnt seen any of the main attractions still so there was a glimmer of hope for the supposedly romantic city! After buying a baguette, ham and coleslaw we retired to our room to watch rubbish French TV and have a cheapo meal!
The next day was considerably better i must say, we got up relatively early, got the Metro through Paris and headed towards the Louvre! I (Andrew) was reallllly looking forward to going there more than any other place in Paris mostly due to the fact it is the biggest museum in the world and i have a nerdy love for them! It was stunning, the outside aswell as the inside, according to their website there is around 8 miles worth of halls to explore so you get an idea how much there is to explore. We decided to go for the english audio guides because there was only one language on the exhibits (you can guess which… hopefully). They provided us with a nintendo 3DS each with headphones for 10 euros and it definately helped. You can see from the pics below that there is a lot of different sections from egyptian to italian art to greek sculptures etc etc. After spending 5 hours in there our heads were fried and we wandered over to the Eiffel tower, a big, overated metal tower! Dont get me wrong it is a very beautiful structure in the way its made but once you have stood there and looked at it for a minute, thats about as exciting as it gets!
We left the next morning and set off towards our next helpx!
overall opinion of Paris was… Manchester with nice, fancy bits! and more French people, and Americans.
