Tuesday/Wednesday, April 27/28, 2010
Day 1
Le Voyage
Tuesday morning I went to SLC airport and caught my plane to Boston where I was to have a one hour layover until my next flight over the "pond" to the Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. However, my flight to Boston was delayed half an hour so when we got there we (myself and two other girls in my program, Paris and Sarah...yes her name is Paris) only had about fifteen to twenty minutes to go cross the airport to the international terminal (not close by!) go through security and board the plane to Paris. The flight attendant at the desk by our gate asked us if we wanted her to put us on a different flight to Amsterdam instead since we were late but that would have been way to complicated for my liking so we took off running through the airport. When we were about two-thirds of the way there another flight attendant started calling to us from down the hall asking if we were on the Paris flight, to which we replied "YES!!" She then proceeded to run with us and called in on her walkie-talkie saying, "I got them, we're on our way!" etc. It was very intense and very much like the movies as we sprinted through the airport and practically ran through security as well. I was the first to get through to the gate so I start walking down the gateway where a small group of attendants are gathered in front of the plane's door. As I'm speedwalking toward them one of the ladies says, "Part the way, like Moses!" Haha, so as I come through I put out both my hands and give them all high fives as I mock-run through the tunnel. When I talked to the girls afterwards they said that as they were coming through after me the attendant said, "Oh here comes another rock star!" Oui, I'm kind of a big deal.
So, I finally made it on the plane. I sat down and once we were in the air I ordered my food from the cute male flight attendant en francais and then I sat back, relaxed and enjoyed the flight--well, I sat back...but only about four inches, you know airplane seats, they're built for comfort! Six hours and a sore neck later we were landing in Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport at about 6am Wednesday morning (fours hours earlier in the day than when I had left the U.S. that morning). Nothing like a good flight to Europe to screw up your internal clock.
Once we got off the plane we went through customs--got a stamp on my passport!--and got our luggage, which miraculously made it on the plane with us. Then I called for our shuttle and we were picked up and taken to our hotel in Paris. We arrived at the Hotel Etap de Vincennes around 8 o'clock in the morning where we met up with our professor and a few other people who had arrived before us. We were able to leave our luggage with them and then went down the street to grab a quick bite to eat from the market, get some money from the ATM and then ate our food in a nearby park. After we ate three of us took the metro to La Tour Eiffel and the Champs Elysees. Unfortunately I was not in a good mood so the experience was a little anticlimatic. I was so tired from the flight (it was about six in the morning according to my body and I hadn't really slept at all since 7am the day before) that I had become extremely cantankerous and was begrudging my companions for deciding to go on this little tour and all I could think of was how much I wanted to not be at the Eiffel Tower and how much better looking a bed was. Another negative was that I didn't have my battery in my camera so I couldn't take any pictures, but that's ok because oh wait! I'm here for five weeks.
So, after seeing these lovely monuments we headed back on the metro to our hotel where three of our rooms were ready early. Because we were the only ones back we got to settle in first. We helped carry the luggage up to keep them in our rooms while we waited for the rest of the group to arrive and I took a relaxing two hour nap, sent off an email to my parents, and took a shower. At 7pm we went down the block to a restaurant to eat dinner as a class. I ordered a vegetarian pizza that was pretty good although it has much less crust, cheese and veggies than an American pizza would. I also had a really delicious chocolate ice cream sundae dessert. All ordered in French of course.
After dinner a small group of us decided we wanted to do a little exploring (by this point I was on my second wind and wasn't really that sleepy). So we hopped on the metro and went to the Centre de Pompidou (a famous modern art museum that looks like it was built inside out). As we were heading back we found that the metro station we had taken was closed at 11 for construction. So it took us about an hour and a half of getting lost in the metro system before we could find the right station and line to get back to our hotel. By this point I was ready for bed and tucked in at about 1am.
End of Day 1 of my France experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment