France Day 1 - Paris - 28/12/10

6:21am - we’re finally here!  Plane just stopped moving at the terminal.  Whoopee :D  

11:30am - Finally arrived at the tiny Paris hotel room, after an EPIC metro &train journey.  We had an encounter with the scary metro doors.  When those things shut … it’s fast and it hurts :( 

I have discovered I am a weakling after dragging my 17+kg luggage up and down the metro stairs (there were no escalators or lifts to be found). J disagrees, but I think I need more exercise.  Majorly.  

12.30pm - headed out in search of food.  Starving.  Food was found and eaten. :D  see below.

Latin Quarter

We decided to head over to the Latin Quarter for a walking tour to see the sights.  1st stop was the Cafe Delmas.  Supposedly a popular tourist cafe (according to lonely planet).  The walls were dune up in a lovely faded yellow tan semi-marbled effect.  The ceiling also had really nice details on it.  We had a nice lunch of lamb and veal, served by a cute French waiter.  Language was not a barrier, thankfully.  He spoke passable English, and I spoke passable French, lol.

Afterwards we strolled along the cobblestoned streets of the Latin Quarter.   (actually a lot of Paris had cobblestoned streets).  I loved all the older painted brick buildings with the tiny wrought iron banister balconies.  

We managed to work our way over to the Pantheon (albeit the back of it).  The Pantheon is a huge Romanesque structure.  We made a pitstop at a bookstore to get a handy plastic pocket map.  I didn’t discover that the explanations of the monuments on the map was in Spanish until 4 days later. :S  oopsies.  Observant.  Hey, the actual map part was in French, so we didn’t look to closely at the other parts :P.  

 Anywho, we took a few photos outside the Pantheon in the drizzling rain, then circled around to the front to see if we can get in.  We were confronted with what we thought at the time to be an impressively daunting line (we would later discover that that line was pretty tame by Paris tourist attraction standards).  we decided we didn’t really need to go in, and moved on.  

So we headed over instead to the church of St Etienne du Mont, where we saw some beautiful stained glass windows.  The church was a typical gothic style church, with large elaborate ceilings and windows.  

After that, we got a little lost.  We found a random theatre, stopped off at a random convenience store to get supplies (water & fruits), and eventually found our way back to the hotel for a quiet dinner of yummy French bread, cheese and ham in our room.

missing journal entries …

So … yeah.  I haven’t been posting my travel stories … I’ve been too caught up and haven’t gotten around to them yet.  Having too much fun you know :P   

But I will make up for it with posts of each day with photos from our little food journal also :D heheh.  

*mwah*

France Day 0 - 27/12/10

1.50 pm (Australia) - Waiting for my plane at my Gate, after having a coffee with my trusty sidekick ‘Char’ the pink dragon, and ma ami ‘J’.  Even the dreary drizzly awful weather outside cannot dampen my excitement that I am finally going to be jetting off to France!

I’ve been wanting to go for so long I can hardly believe it’s really happening. 

My multiple personality sidekick ‘Char’ (who may be randomly identifying with some of my other sidekicks friends) is waiting not so patiently beside me in my red handbag.  he’s very upset that I chose a red handbag when he is so obviously pink. 

J is already on her flight, and she’ll come find me at our mutual stopover in Singapore.  yay! :)

Ooh! They’re loading the mothers and childrean on the plane.  So the rest of us will be boarding soon.  can’t wait!

A bientot.

2:52pm (Australia) - On the plane now.  But there is a sudden downpour of rain.  Sheets of water are just rolling off of the wing I’m steated above.  The captains announced we’re delaying for another 15-20mins to wait for the storm to pass.  We were supposed to take off 10mins ago!

Char says he is very annoyed at the delay! *pouts*

Hopefully J’s plane was lucky enough to have taken off on time.

I want to take Char out and take a photo of him on the window … but the other passengers might think it a bit strange … maybe later :P

I have annoying little boys seated behind me.  Chatting non stop to their mum.  Not happy.  :( It’s already getting on my nerves.  *fingers crossed* the headphones will drown out their questions.

3.20pm (Aust) -  we have take off!  That is all.

3.37pm - we are now above the clouds and I can finally see blue skies (for the first time in like a week). 

7.30pm - Bored now. 

Very bored.

Discovered James Masters (aka Spike) is the one of the first big baddies of the pilot for the newly remade Hawaii 5-O :D yum.  That is how bored I was.  I watched that.

8.45 pm (Singapore time) - landed in Singapore :) Yay! I’m almost halfway there!