Paris – Day 1
WOW!
Where do I begin?!
First things first, I WILL be posting a lot over the next few weeks, with constant updates from the various cities I visited while on my 3 week adventure around Europe. BUT I’ll need time to do so because I’m so bogged down with the inconvenience of having my bag stolen. However, this is a story for another time.
I’ll skip the boring crap explaining how I reached possibly the worst looking hostel in the world – the clink. If anything ever comes of my blog, I’ll highly enforce a de-marketing scheme of this hostel. Although I didn’t technically stay there, I was told from my new found American friends, “it’s a shithole”, and that’s to put it nicely. This was drastically reinforced all trip.
ANYWAY, we reached Dover ports and got on the ferry where we crossed the English Channel to reach Calais in France. The first piece of Europe I saw. I’ve never been more excited in my life.
Along the way I met the people I’d be spending most of my time with over the next few weeks, people who I’m stoked I met, they made the trip that much more enjoyable. We began drinking right away with beers and double vodka’s on the ferry. I knew this was going to be a unique experience and there was a possibility I may just die.
Hours passed and we ended up in Paris. I’ll tell you now – my first impression of Paris was not positive or appealing. It was depressing, almost to the point of being worrying. It looked dirty, slummy. It was plastered with graffiti and there were guys walking around like I was walking down the streets of Harlem. But I soaked it up, I was in Paris after all and therefore I didn’t really care.
We walked down this part of Paris on the first night and saw a beautiful looking church called the Montmartre. I have pictures and these will also go up over time as there are plenty of them, I’ll try captioning them too to make things a little easier.
Before we began climbing the hill, we were approached by some guys.
Now before I go on, please let me be the first to warn you. Europe can be a very DODGY place. The streets in almost every city we visited were crawling with these guys. They are generally of African or Indian decent (this is in no way racial, but a heads up to the people who will be travelling there in a few months time). They try to trap, weave and manipulate tourists into their mind games, their products and their lies. Don’t ever do anything. The first guys we encountered were the guys known as the ‘finger people’. Basically they want to show you a string they tie around your finger, if they get you, they tell you they’ve performed a service and you owe them 20 euro’s. Meanwhile you can’t go anywhere because they are holding you with the other end of the string and they have 20 other big fellas walking toward you saying you need to pay. Most people get intimidated and they pay. I have a photo of a girl being done here as well.
Donal safely told them all to ‘get lost’ – in a more abrupt way.
After we saw the church, we took some snaps of the part of Paris we had seen so far. We continued on our driving tour where we saw some really famous and incredible landmarks – all lit up so uniquely. The Arc de Triumph, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Grand Opera etc. It really is the city of light.
My impression of Paris was changing. The following day and night definitely helped that cause.
Wait for it…
5 Comments
“Is Great Britain part of Europe” seems to have become a complex question and one that’s never been answered with authority.
Without getting into the tectonic plates argument (which would mean that NZ is part of Australia), I suppose the answer can only be dependant on context whether geographic, economic, political or cultural – or combination of all of them.
The poms still don’t like the idea, and there are plenty of Germans, French, Italians etc. who feel the same way about them, but since a British passport holder has the right to live and work anywhere in the EU without the need for a work/residency visa, I guess he’s no different to any other citizen of the EU.
For me the final nail in the coffic for the “separatist” argument is that even though there are still passport checks, they’re are not legally required under EU law, and once on the continent/mainland, the poms can (theoretically) travel freely between all EU countries.
As for the currency, to the best of my knowledge the euro isn’t yet “legal tender” in the UK, however businesses can choose to accept them as payment if they want.
My (argumentative) 2c
Yea I know they are technically called a part of Europe, but one thing I noticed is that the two countries I visited who weren’t under the ‘EU’ wasn’t using Euro’s?
The Swiss use Franks and the Czech’s use Crowns – they aren’t a part of the EU – technically. Does this mean that the English using ‘pounds’ is the same deal?
Lucky you have Donal there to protect you, he so rugged haha. Will be good to hear about the rest of the tour, that’s if you still remember all of it!
p.s. I had something else in mind when you started talking about the finger people.
Wasn’t London the first part of Europe that you saw?