A Year Abroad: P minus 3.

After having my final house inspection yesterday and succeeding (yay), I did a final pack and run and then jumped into bed early.

I was up at 4am this morning to make my 6:23am train. After getting ready a littler earlier than expected, I decided to just sit in my room and enjoy the final bit of time. Haha that made me upset after about two minutes, so I decided to just go. I met Lucy at the station who was going to Paris and catching a flight to Poland.

Arriving at Paris at 10am, I used the metro (with all my luggage) to find my hotel and checked in. I didn't have any problems whatsoever. A lot of metro stations don't have lifts, so a few times random people who saw me struggling up the stairs, stopped and helped me. The streets weren't busy at all, which was good. I did have one guy come and stand really close to me while I was looking at my phone for directions, so just moved up a little. He came and stood next to me and all my luggage again, so I told him to go away, and he did.

I then had plans to meet up with Nat, so I walked to Notre Dame and sat there eating lunch, until she arrived. It's quite an impressive structure! We then went in and enjoyed listening to a mass going on while we were exploring.

Afterwards, we walked up to the Louvre. It started raining about then, so we quickly ran inside. Lucky, Paris is empty atm! We didn't have to queue for anything all day, and all of the tourist attractions weren't crowded at all (and free, because we're EU residents)! We just walked into any entrance, thinking the entire museum was connected. But, as we discovered, it's not. There are different entrances in the main hall to different sections. We walked around the sculpture and Renaissance section for about half an hour, which I'm glad we did, because there was some pretty impressive stuff in there. Eventually, we exited that section and found the Mona Lisa (ou Le Jaconde) section and did the typical tourist photo op.

Afterwards, we walked through the Jardin des Tuileries and up to Place de la Concorde, where Christmas markets started, and the up the Champs-Elysées. At the end, discovering the Arc de Triomphe was free, we climbed it. It was such an amazing view! Straight down the Champs and over to the Eiffel Tower.

We then headed for the Eiffel. As it was starting to get dark at that time, we didn't climb it, but plan to go back tomorrow.

Heading back to the Latin Quarter for dinner, we passed Invalides and did a bit of window shopping, waiting for 7:30pm and (non tourist) restaurants to open. We went to a really cozy French restaurant behind my hotel, and I had the most relish chickpea soup and braised chicken.

After, we caught the metro back to the Jardins de Trocadero and watched the Eiffel lit up and sparkling!