3.18.08 – Tuesday
REAL-TIME UPDATE:
I’m back in Greece after Spring Break, and we’re on another trip, this time a 6-day trip until Saturday, March 22 in Northern Greece. We left Athens yesterday at 8:00am and went to Delphi (famous for the Oracle), and today we’re at Meteora (famous for its monasteries)! Other highlights of this current trip are that we will be going to Thessaloniki on Wednesday and me hopefully being able to visit my friend Sophie (who came to visit me in Athens a couple of weeks ago) there while she is studying abroad in Thessaloniki!
SPRING BREAK RECAP:
WEDNESDAY / MERCREDI: I continued my Spring Break trip from Rome and flew to Marseilles, France. My flight went well; I got to the airport with enough time to spare. The plane was rather small… I’ve never flown on a plane that had external propellers and could only seat around 50-70-ish people! But it wasn’t bad… they gave us free newspapers (only one was in English)! So arrived in Marseilles where my friend Hayley met me at the airport and we took a 30-min bus ride to Aix-en-Provence, where Hayley is living/studying for this academic year. She showed me the city, which is completely filled with a multitude of fountains and churches! It’s really a neat place… the first thing I did actually was eat a Nutella and banana crêpe WHICH WAS AMAZING! mmmmm….. so we hung out, dropped my stuff off at Hayley’s dorm room, then we went to the local internet café and I met a couple of her friends: Amy and Stephanie. They seem really cool! They were telling Hayley some crazy story of how a guy that works at some restaurant in Aix (pronounced “ex”) was avoiding them for some reason…. either way, I enjoyed their company… haha. Finally on this day of travel, we went back to the dorm, watched about half of the movie Superbad before passing out for the night.
THURSDAY / JEUDI: Hayley and I took a train to Paris from Aix-en-Provence / Marseilles sometime in the late morning and arrived early in the afternoon… it was a TGV train which got us there in just over 3 hours. It started to rain basically as soon as we left the train station, and did not stop for the rest of the night, sadly. We dropped our bags off at the hostel and then set out for our first Paris adventures! In the square by our apartment, there was a huge monument that made for a great landmark for us to find our way back within the consecutive days. During this day, our goal was originally to go see Notre Dame and maybe head back to the hostel or something, but we somehow ended FIRST going the completely opposite direction *coughitwashayleysfaultcough*, for a good 4 or 5 blocks, but it wasn’t too bad as we found a grocery store where we bought some bread and cheese, stopped at a Starbucks (which Hayley doesn’t have in Aix), and saw some other random “non-famous” sites. Once we turned around and got on the right path, we stumbled upon the House of Victor Hugo which was pretty cool… there’s a park in the middle, so we sat down and ate our pain-et-fromage lunch. After that, we finally made it to Notre Dame, but we got there about 5 minutes AFTER they stopped letting tourists in, which stunk. So we took some outside pictures of it, then walked along the Seine River for a while. We then wandered around and saw the Pantheon, a couple other sites, the Luxembourg Gardens, and eventually stopped by Musée d’Orsay to check the museum’s hours. Turns out they’re open later on Thursdays and were currently open, so we walked in to see the price of admission. It was FREE for people under 26 years old! So we walked around it for a good 1.5 hours and saw some sculptures and paintings, including some famous ones by Van Gogh and Monet. As we were walking out, some lady was asking Hayley something, and ended up doing a oral survey in French about the museum experience, and I did it as well, except I got to do mine in English :) The lady who was administering my survey informed me that tomorrow (Friday) at 6pm, people who were under 26 years old could go for FREE! It was just getting better and better! So after that, when we left, we figured we should go see the Eiffel Tower during the night time, since we were planning on seeing it in the daytime the next day. It was one of the most amazing sites I’ve ever seen! We got there around 9pm, and apparently on the hour, the already-lit-up-at-night Eiffel Tower SPARKLES! It was sooo cool! Hayley and I got a bunch o’ pictures of it, and of us in front of it… I was so ecstatic to see the Tower… simply awesome. There were some crazy guys trying to sell these glow-in-the-dark blinking miniature Eiffel Towers and keychain Eiffel Towers while we were there, and it got VERY overwhelming because we kept stumbling upon more and MORE of these people… they kept bombarding us! They kept saying “un euro, un euro!” meaning “one euro”, and at one point, one guy came up to us trying to sell it, and IMMEDIATELY another one came even though we said no, and we kept walking away… and ANOTHER came! We got kind of angry, so we started to head home. At this point, our feet hurt a bunch, and as Paris is a huge city, it would have been quite painful and impossible to walk back to our hostel, so we figured out how to take the bus back, and it worked out quite well… we got back, settled into our hostel room, and then went out for a Guinness at the Irish Pub which was like 4 buildings away… ‘twas a pretty cool environment… we got discounts for being students, too! Later we got some tasty crêpes, then went back to the hostel, and passed out pretty fast.
FRIDAY / VENDREDI: Hayley and I woke up really early (for our standards) at around 7:30, 8:00 am on Friday morning, even when we had our alarms set for 9:30am. We were très perplexé, as we both notoriously sleep in late and normally sleep for an unnatural amount of hours :) So I decided to take a shower since I was so awake, and when I came out of the bathroom, Hayley had fallen asleep again but I didn’t wake her, so we ended up leaving our hostel room around 10 or 10:30 I think. Today it didn’t rain (except for about 10 min at one point during the day) but it was overcast the whole day and the temperature was kind of cool. The first thing we did was take the metro towards the Eiffel Tower. We waited in line to take the elevator up one of the Eiffel Tower’s legs, but noticed it was much cheaper to walk up the stairs, so we did that. It was something like 700 or more steps, but it didn’t really seem like it. It was an awesome experience! We could see so much of the city with our heightened view… glorious! We descended la Tour Eiffel and again walked along and traversed the Seine, this time to the destination of The Statue of Liberty! That’s right… the Statue of Liberty! We saw it! It looked identical to the New York version (from what I’ve seen on TV—I’ve never been to NY), except for the fact that it was probably 1/6 the size of it or so… it was actually rather small, but I read that it was America’s gift to the French, I think it was to thank France for its gift of the regular-size SoL to the States. Also, if you’ve seen the (Hayley’s favorite) movie “National Treasure 2: The Book of Secrets”, the Statue is seen and is a clue that leads to them solving the mystery of the movie. After we saw the Statue, we then found l’Arc de Triomphe. You cannot simply walk up to it; it is surrounded by the largest roundabout I have ever seen! The French have thankfully provided a tunnel under the roundabout for people to safely cross the road and visit the Arch. I promptly took my midday nap on the foot of it… Hayley said people looked at me weird, like maybe I was a bum or something… oh well, I was tired :) Then we walked down the famous street called Champs-Elysée. We stopped at a bakery called Paul, Starbucks, and a supermarket while walking down this huge street. We walked and walked and walked… then we ended up by the Egyptian obelisk and a bunch of formal castle-looking places. I think we saw the President’s house, but I’m not 100% sure if it was… there were some guards outside the fence by the gate. By this time, it was just before 6:00pm when the Louvre museum was FREE! We waited by it and entered, and spent about an hour and a half or two walking through and looking at everything. We saw the Mona Lisa, the Venus statue, a lot of Egyptian objects, Roman, French, and Greek statues, and a piece of the Parthenon, among other things. The Mona Lisa wasn’t as impressive as I thought it might be, mostly due to the fact that it was hanging on this huge wall in the middle of a room in the Louvre, it was the only thing on the wall, and it just looked small. It also probably didn’t help that there were like 40 people standing in front of it taking pictures WITH FLASH, even though the signs clearly say NOT to do that… gosh some people are stupid, and disrespectful for famous works of art! The museum guards didn’t really do anything about it, but I have a feeling that they have tried to stop people from using their flashes, but it just becomes impossible to prevent it if there are so many people and these people don’t know how to work their cameras… So after the Louvre, we went to Hard Rock Café: Paris. We got a bbq bacon cheese burger and some mac & cheese….. Let’s face it, American food is just what you need once in a while :) We spent a while at Hard Rock, then commenced with our 45 min walk home, and just sat around the apartment and watched some French TV and promptly passed out well before midnight.
SATURDAY / SAMEDI: This day was our last day in Paris and it was finally not cloudy or rainy! We had previously believed that the Paris sun did not exist… Saturday changed our beliefs. We only had one goal on this day, and it was to go see the inside of Notre Dame before we had to board our train. Long story short, we failed. But not for a bad reason… we started off going straight towards it (though technically we took a screwy way to it [as in not the most direct way], as was a theme with route planning for me, and Hayley too) but made some stops for lunch… we got a baguette and La Vache qui Rit cheese… twas a most excellent lunch. We sat and ate on the bridge which was right next to ND. During lunch we were treated to a live band (alto, tenor, and baritone saxes, guitar, bass, drummer, and some singers) who was quite excellent. When we were finished with lunch, we walked along the side of ND and were trying to find the best place to buy a crêpe, and then we got in line for the entrance to Notre Dame. While waiting, everyone in line got some entertainment in the form of this middle-aged man walking up and down the street wearing this goofy, misshapen, old man mask and scared people. He would try different strategies… sneaking up behind people then walking as fast as them, then poking his head between people. Everyone was thoroughly amused, because what caused the most entertainment was the startled reaction of the scared people… ‘twas good fun. And then, of course, Hayley and I realized that we would not have enough time to make it inside ND at the rate the line was moving, so we reluctantly left the line and headed back to the hostel to grab our bags and head to the train station. We departed Gare de Lyon in Paris around 3pm and arrived 3 hours later in Marseilles, took a bus to Aix, and hung out there for the night. We got some more crêpes, I got a croissant from Paul, Hayley found some popcorn at the internet café, and we headed back to her dorm. We hung out there for the night with her friend Amy, had some drinks to make up for us missing the “new” St. Patrick’s Day on Friday the 15th, and watched the part of “National Treasure 2” where they were in France and you could see the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty! Then we finished the second half of Superbad and called it a night.
SUNDAY / DIMANCHE / KYRIAKI:
----- The short story: I spent my first day EVER in three different countries—that is, actually spending some time in the countries, not just a short little layover or connecting flight. I woke up in France (Aix-en-Provence), spent the day in Italy (Rome), and went to sleep in Greece (Athens). Pretty sweet, eh?
----- The long story: I had my first flight of the day from Marseilles to Rome at 10:00AM, so I woke up at 8am, Hayley walked me to the bus stop in Aix and saw me off, I took the bus to the Marseilles Airport, got my bag checked just in time, went through security which lasted about 2 minutes, and boarded the bus that drove us to our small, external-propeller-propelled plane. The flight was about an hour and 45 min, but the only problem was that I had a 7-hour layover in Rome! At first I was planning on just staying in the airport, but I quickly became bored and decided that that was a bad idea, so I walked into town after taking the train to the city. I ate my last official Italian dinner of Spring Break, and then ventured back to “The Old Bridge” Gelateria near the Vatican that my sister-in-law Jill told me about…. mmmmmm I’m going to miss authentic Italian gelato… And then, since it was Roman Catholic Christianity’s Palm Sunday on that Sunday, I went over to the Vatican/Saint Peter’s Basilica area of Rome and tried to see if I could bring a couple palms home with me; alas, the effort was a failure. I got there around 3pm, so no church services were still going on anywhere (that I saw), and I figured I might have gotten lucky and saw some random people selling them on the street, but people sold plenty of other random touristy things instead, per usual. I then decided to head back to the airport, and checked in for my Rome to Athens flight which departed at 7:30pm. On the plane I sat next to a Greek mother and her 5-and-a-half year old son, which turned out to be quite an adventure in itself! We started talking, and the mother had a broken-English-type Greek accent, but the boy spoke good Greek and English, because apparently the mother married an English-speaking husband. Anyway, I was talking to the boy, and he told me that he was 5-and-a-half years old, and I asked him to guess how old I was… he said 59 at first, then 50, then 49, then 35, then 30, and finally 20 years old after I showed him much downward motioning… silly little kids. He told me some stories about how he goes to an English-speaking school in Athens which sounded pretty cool and about his friend who was 11-and-a-half years old... haha… oh, and at one point during the flight, the mother had told me the boy didn’t like airplanes too much, and I found out later that he gets sick on them… He threw up after eating some of the airplane meal, but luckily none of it got on me; I fortunately pulled out my vomit bag in time and gave it to his mother for him to use… it wasn’t bad, just kind of random. ANYWAY, the plane landed at 10:30pm Greek time (which is one hour later than Italy and France’s time zone), took the bus to Syntagma Square in Athens, and got home after midnight. I got some stuff organized for my Northern Greece trip, passed out, woke up late, then hurried up and packed 20 minutes before we had to be on the bus, and made it on time on Monday morning!
Whew….. what a long and AWESOMELY AMAZING trip! I’m so fortunate and thankful that I got to experience what I did… Thanks so much, Mom and Dad!!
And after these long days of exploring the big city of Rome and the even BIGGER city of Paris, my feet hurt and have plenty of blisters… thankfully I haven’t been walking as much on Sunday and these past two days (as we’ve been on the bus for the majority of the trip so far) and my feet have somewhat recovered…
Alrighty, time to go explore the city of Meteora and get some dinner! I hope you enjoyed reading the second half of the story of my European journeys!
-MANNYTHEFRENCHIE
