After arriving in Paris from the night train, we set out to reserve tickets back to Salzburg as the office there wouldn’t allow us to do that. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get the train we wanted (it’s Easter weekend), but we did reserve a train to Stuttgart so hopefully from there we can make it back. We needed a subway ticket for the day, though, so we could get to our hostel and to all the sites we wanted to get to. Spent about an hour waiting for the one ticket machine at Gare de l’est that would take Visa or Mastercard as all others only took coins (we needed 9 € worth and I’m not Gringott’s) or European credit cards. Right when we got to the machine, conveniently the guy ahead of us got his card stuck in the machine. What a pisser. Fortunately, ended up getting tickets from the info desk.
Checked into the St. Christopher’s Hostel, which is a pretty nice chain in Europe. This one shares space with a Holiday Inn Express (located on the back). Decided to see some sites so we took the metro to Notre Dame and saw the outside of that (the Easter or tourist line was ridiculous). We then decided to see “the other Statue of Liberty.” It’s located on a small island under a bridge and is actually bigger than what I anticipated from National Treasure 2 (maybe there are two of them in Paris). It was raining pretty heavily at this point and I forgot my umbrella at the hostel so I was soaked (my head at least). Due to the weather we decided to hit up the Louvre. I used the Rick Steve’s iPod tour that I had downloaded earlier which gave me a pretty good overview of the important sites. Venus di Milo was cool and the Mona Lisa actually impressed me more than I thought it would. The painting seemed more colorful and she had more of a grin. The crowds taking flash photos king of shocked me. Maybe the guards have given up on trying to stop the crowd after so long. The girls weren’t able to find the connecting spires or w/e from the Da Vinci Code.
Tired we headed back to get rest, but ended up talking to the other occupants of our room: two Americans Michael and Gerard, whose respective friends were also arriving that night. I actually ended up talking to our roommate from Scotland more in depth than either. Andrew was traveling for business/pleasure from Scotland and we got to talking about Sean Connery (hypocrite for being a proper Scotsman, but living in a tax haven), Up in the Air (relating to Andrew’s lifestyle right now), beer pong (they don’t know of it), and Top Gear. Really cool guy and funny especially when he started messing with Axelle after she told him about Taken. Asking her to say “whatever” was a real kick to him.
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