First Day in France

All right so here is my recap of day one in Paris after deleting the first one by mistake.We landed at about 9 AM Paris time. Mom had slept on the plane and me and Papa hadn't, but that wasn't too bad. Once we landed, we left the plane and we crossed through a series of long glass lined hallways and could see the airfield outside. What a giant airport! And the planes were huge! Once we got to baggage claim we had to wait forever to find our luggage, probably because the airport there is so big it takes forever to cross and they had to unload around 400 bags just for our plane!

We left baggage claim with our suitcases and it started to make our way towards the train that would bring us into the city. However, finding the trains and getting our tickets was not quite as simple as it would've been in Moncton. For starters at the signs were not super well marked and where they did have signs they were not very specific, so all we really knew was to follow the little signs it had a small circle that said RER in the corner. We got down to the right level and bought her tickets from the machine, crossing our fingers that we were in fact find the right tickets. After that we got on the train and it was a hot hot hot journey into town. The train dropped us off at a very large metro station and from there we had to figure out exactly how to get to our Airbnb.

The station, Chateau Les Halles, was still being built and was by no means easy to navigate. Papa stopped and asked at the helpdesk for how to get to our road because since the building wasn't quite done yet the exit to our road that we knew to take was closed. So we took her advice and through ourselves out into the streets of Paris specifically around the place de Les halles. Since we were in Europe we also need to get a new Sim card so that we could Google maps and look up our apartment and text our landlord. We met some of the friendliest people ever while trying to get our phones working. One guy gave us directions to the phone store and told us that if we couldn't find it on our own to come back and he can bring us there, how nice is that!? And when we got to the store, the man realized we had no clue what to do, so he put in and activated our new sim cards for us. "You're Canadian?" He guessed, (maybe from our French, not sure how but he caught us!)

We got settled into her apartment which was uhm, quaint let's call it. The apartment was 50 m² bag with one bedroom one bathroom and one with mostly all in a giant square room themselves. Basically we were squeezing a whole house into 500 ft.²  I was just pumped to be in the middle of the city and in a real French apartment, but I'm not exactly sure how much mom  and papa enjoyed sleeping on the Japanese style mats that made up their bed room. It was about lunchtime when we got to her apartment and get all settled in and met our landlord for the week. 

After settling in we went out and explored Paris!! As many of you know I've been talking about the food and Francis since the last time I was here and could not wait to find a crepe. And lucky for me I did!! 

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking up and down la seine river. And just generally soaking up Paris and the sun and all the street vendors and all of the architecture and the river and the beautiful beautiful buildings that were around us. Mom was pretty wiped out from travelling and actually got a little bit of what we thought then the sick from the heat so we went home to the apartment and waited until suppertime for it to be less hot before ventured out again. We ate our first supper in Paris at, ironically, and Irish pub ha ha! It was delicious actually. Once we were done so and I had had another big thing of what we ventured back to our apartment for a big snooze.