Since October 3 is the National German Day of Unity (basically their fourth of July), we didn’t have classes. That meant we got an extra 2 days of traveling this weekend! We decided to spend the weekend in Paris! We took the bus overnight Thursday. With all the traveling we have done with Flixbus, we expected a nice journey. Wrong. It was 20 minutes late to begin with and we were stopped at the border twice! They collected out passport and had a dog on board to search everyone. With all these delays, were ended up getting to Paris about two and half hours after anticipated, which messed up our plans a bit. We had booked a hostel near the city center, which was quite interesting. It was my first experience with one of these. We had a room to ourselves with a bunk bed, but only 1 outlet, which made it difficult to charge phones. Our “free breakfast” was 3 tokens to the vending machine. Definitely not looking forward to going back, but it did allow us a place to sleep in a bed, and not on the bus this time!
We spent Friday afternoon roaming around near hour hostel, and then making the trek to the Eiffel Tower. It was over an hour walk, so we opted to figure out the metro system! As soon as we got off the train, we could immediately see it. It was somehow bigger than I expected! We took a boat tour around the city so we got to see where all the big monuments were located, and it gave us a good idea of the setup of the city. For dinner, we opted for a small crepe stand, and it was the BEST DECISION EVER. They were fantastic.
Saturday morning, we headed to Versailles to explore the palace. I thought it would be an hour or so, but we ended up spending the whole day there! From looking at all the detailed architecture around the palace, to the giant gardens, to Marie-Antoinette’s estate, it was quite a lot of walking. Everything was so beautiful. Honestly my dream to live in a castle – even for just a night. The gardens were so peaceful. There were a ton of people just hanging out and having a picnic lunch. The whole palace was unique and literally made you feel like royalty.
On Sunday, we began the day at Notre Dame, the biggest church in Paris. From there, we went all in as tourist. We got a paper map from the hostel and planned our route. We were going to walk to every touristy spot in the city, so it was going to be a long day. I think in total we went about 17 miles. It was great to see all these big statues and building and monuments, that were just every day to the people of Paris. We somehow ended up at Paris Fashion Week also. There was huge runway set up, and booths selling makeup, hair stuff, and clothes. The streets around it were all shut down and we could walk straight down the middle. There were street dancers and musicians everywhere and was overall really cool. Walking around with the map definitely made us stick out as tourist, but also made me feel very adult. I didn’t have to rely on google all day to tell me what to do! After all that walking though, I slept fantastic that night.
My favorite part of Paris came on Monday. Disneyland!! With Rollins so close to Walt Disney World, I basically go every weekend, so being at Disneyland Paris felt like an extension of home. It was so magical! And since my friend had never been there, I got to show her all the in and out of Disney. They had some rides that were that same as in Disney World, but now they were in French! It made things like the Tower of Terror a bit less scary, but it was still a fun ride! Since it was October, they had everything decorated for Halloween, and a bunch of Villains out in the park. We didn’t have time to stop and meet any, but that may have been for the best because I might have had a heart attack from excitement. Hopefully this little taste of magic will be enough to last me until I can get back to the Magic Kingdom!