Where’s Megan?

Ah, Paris… such a short time (1 day) yet much to do. I arrived at 6:00 am from London (via bus-boat-bus), and set out to see everything in Paris in one day. I totally failed, but did manage to see a few highlights:

Notre Dame and the cool gargoyles:

The Louvre, which was incredibly huge.

I spent about 3 hours there and saw less than half of it, but did get to view the Mona Lisa, Venus di Milo, and some other impressive things. I also walked around the Eiffel Tower area, almost got hit by a naked guy on a motorcycle, and ended the day at a great modern art museum/mall called the Centre Pompideau, which also had a collection too huge to see everything.
[I took a few good pictures in these places, but due to technical difficulties, they were tragically lost. Just use your imagination!]

I got a good night´s sleep and headed out the next day on a train to Perpignan, a town near the Spanish border. I nearly missed the train, and when I finally got on, I met a girl who seemed very nice until she accidentally led me off the train at the wrong stop. Oh well, I had lunch with her and her friend in Montpellier, and made it to Perpignan later that day.

This would be my first of many train near-misses to come. On my way to Barcelona, I had to change trains several times, but luckily one of the stops was a beautiful little village on the coast, Cerbere:

With that kind of view, I needed a proper french meal. All I had to eat in Paris were baguette sandwiches, so I took this opportunity and bought some fancy cheese, bread, and some fruit.

And that was the end of my brief visit to France. Although it was short, I did discover several things that were.. surprising.. maybe disappointing… let´s just call them “Fun Facts:”

Streets? dirty
Mona Lisa? small
Eiffel tower? light beige?
National pastime? chainsmoking
Maps? definitely not to scale
Museums? huge
Hostel? nice (with real towels!)
Preferred haircut? A facinating Mohawk-Mullet hybrid
Down-arrow on a sign? Means straight ahead, not back or downstairs. (See train incident above)

But despite their best efforts, I finally found my way out of France! More to come soon from España!

(P.S. Some of you clever people have already figured it out, but if you click on any of the pictures in here, you go directly to my photo repository. Here you can see every single one of my pictures, in albums by area. You may see other things of interest that I didn´t include here, but be warned: there´s a lot, and I´m not a photographer.)

Tags: France, paris, Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 11:23 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.