Paris

Paris was quite an interesting trip. It started off quite poorly, but all in all, turned out great.

So my flight to Paris was booked for 8:20 am. It left from the Girona airport, which is about an hour bus ride from Barcelona, but the bus station is literally right across the street from our residence, so it's actually pretty convenient. The busses tend to run about every half hour or so. So I figured I needed to leave somewhere around 6:00 am to be in pretty good shape. Well it just so happens that a bus schedule which starts its runs with busses to Girona at 3:00 am, 3:15 am, and 3:30 am, doesn't have ANY busses that go to Girona between 5:45 and 7:00 am. So when I get there at 6:00, I've already missed the last bus that can take me to my destination on time. And this is after staying up most of the night packing. So I get on the 7am anyways just in case I can make it.

No dice.

I get to Girona. It's already 8:20, so I've missed my flight, and when I talk to the ticketing guy, he tries to help me out, but it's a discount airline. They're not gonna refund my ticket or apply it to another ticket when I miss my flight. So that sucked. I had to take the bus back to BCN, which amounted to another hour of bumpy sleep, then immediately booked the cheapest ticket I could find for the next day (Saturday), and passed back out for some stressed out, angry sleep. A pretty intensely frustrating day, all in all.

So the next day we make our respective flights, and I end up in Paris about 4 hours before the other guys, so I proceed to wander semi-aimlessly through the city. I find the Louvre pretty quickly, then wander past it in search of Pont Neuf. Anyone in the immediate family should know the significance of Pont Neuf.

*clears throat* And I quote: "Paris. 5 pm. Pont Neuf. You go alone. You walk to the middle of the bridge, take off your jacket, and face east. I'll call you then."

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

That would be The Borne Identity. Borne talking on the phone to the main bad guy that was the head of the project that "trained" Borne.

So yeah. I wasn't wearing a jacket, just a sweater, but I did walk to the middle of the bridge and check out the view. Pretty sweet.

So after chillin and wanderin for a while, I finally met up with Kevin. Kabir ended up spending the day with his sister who had been living there, so Kevin and I decided to start at the Louvre, walk through the Toulleries gardens and down the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomf. I pretty much had no idea what any of this meant at the time, and still pretty much don't, but I have at least a general idea now. The Toulleries are the gardens just outside of the Louvre. Lots of green grass, statues, and some pretty flowers. A good set of trees, and it opens up at the end as a circle with ramps on the sides that lead up to a wall that overlooks a circular plaza/roundabout type deal.

What's cool about the roundabout, is the obelisk standing in the middle of it. It's a frickin 3000 year old obelisk that was given to one of the French kings by one of the Egyptian pharaohs in what I'm sure must have been the biggest brown-nosing political suck-up EVER. The obelisk is 3000 years old, made of pink granite, and was taken from the temple of Ramses. That sounds like bad ju-jus if I've ever heard of them. Taking an ancient, giant sculpture from a temple an giving it as a bs gift? Pbbt.

It was very pretty to look at though, as it was carved with hieroglyphics and the pyramidic point of the top was gilded in gold. Still, taking an obelisk that old, from a temple, and putting it in a traffic roundabout?? Get out of here.

It just so happens that this is also where I tried my first crepe. Quite good, I guess. Kindof like a thin pancake that was wrapped around a lot of hot strawberry jelly.

This was also where we ran into the Segue guys. There were guys in this area that were giving Segue rides of 15 min for 5 euro, so we said heck yeah. It's definitely worth 5 euro to me to play around on a Segue for 15 min. Which, as it turns out, is all the time you really want to spend playing on a Segue. They are pretty much as cool as they are pitched, in the sense that they balance you, read your body movements for directions, and so on, but as a novelty, without a lot of space to play around in, their alloted attention span can get pretty short. Lol. But still definitely worth the 5 euro.

Entry unfinished. Still to come: rainbow, champs elysees, kissing girl, arc de triomf, pictures, bad tourist pictures, meeting dave, good food, Eiffel tower by night, glittering Eiffel tower, random girls, lame, finding a random bar, expensive, cab home. And that's day 1 of paris.

Homework for now. Will try and keep up the posts. I'm starting to think seriously about travel oriented jobs now...

Love and hugs (I'll be doing my "Free Hugs" project tomorrow),
Kenny