Paris Day 1

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”

Hey everyone! As promised here’s the first part of my Paris trip. It’s been two weeks since I’ve come back from vacation and it still doesn’t feel real that I got to take London and Paris off my bucket list! Honestly, in my mind I’m still there haha! It’s so hard going back to reality after a good vacation. I think that’s why the quote above resonated with me so much. Anyways, so after my third day in London it was time to go to Paris by Eurostar (train) the next day. It was so hard for my entire tour group to leave London because we all just fell in love with it! I’m not sure how long it took by train to get to Paris since I fell asleep but it seemed like it was no time at all. 

Once we arrived, we went on another bus tour with a local tour guide and of course us, girls needed to go to the bathroom beforehand so we had to use the paid ones at the train station. Charging for public bathrooms is kinda ridiculous but hey at least they were clean! My first impressions of Paris after walking out of the train station was that it’s architecture (so far) was beautiful and you could defiantly detect a different “vibe” from the city compared to London. In other words…it was gross and smelly! My trip consultant warned us of “Paris syndrome” a couple weeks before the trip which is basically when you’re tricked into thinking that Paris is this perfect place because of the way it’s portrayed in movies and stories. Naturally, I didn’t believe her and thought to myself “What could possibly be bad about Paris?!” Little did I know, that I wouldn’t be 100% in love with the city. Shocking right? I always thought to myself that Paris would feel like home! Nope, London was much more comforting to me. But we’ll get to that later 😉

One of the lessons I’ve learned through this trip is the reasons why people in general travel: to find the truth. In your mind, you have this certain perception of how things are going to be when in fact, they turn out to be nothing like you imaged. This could either be good or bad. But either way, at least you got to truly experience it for yourself.

Sorry for getting side-tracked, anyways the bus tour was “okay” to say the least. We got a good general view of the big attractions while sitting in our seats but I prefer walking around and seeing it up close. Here’s some shots that I got while driving around which are terrible but get the job done haha:

And of course we stopped at the biggest attraction in Paris…THE EIFFEL TOWER!

It’s amazing to see something online and in movies a hundred times but to see it in person is so much more different. It’s cool to have my own pictures of it! Don’t worry I took a lot more that I’ll show you later haha. Afterwards, we all went to our hotel for some rest and went to dinner at an authentic Parisian restaurant that I can’t remember the name of, naturally. Of course, when in Paris you have to order a bunch of desserts including Creme Brulee!

After dinner, our tour guide said he had a special surprise for us and led us to the…Sacre Coeur! It’s a famous Roman Catholic Church that looks gorgeous at night and you could see the city lit up from there. Of course, this was the one night I chose not to carry my big DSLR and had to settle for iPhone photos 🙁

Hope you liked this post and stay tuned for day 2!

-Ruya