Monday, February 9, 2009
Woke up, had breakfast in the hostel, got ready, then checked out at 9:30. Paid to lock our backpacks in lockers then wandered around Paris for quite a while and once again, it was freezing cold and raining. Went back to check out the Hôtel de Ville, Ile de la Cité, the Latin Quarter, La Sorbonne, Luxembourg gardens, then took the Metro to Sacre-Coeur. It was so beautiful! Came back and stopped at a little café by the Louvre for lunch and split two meals again – such a great way to do it because if one is bad you won’t starve and they’re usually too rich/sharp tasting to finish one whole meal. Got our bags and warmed up a bit (literally, I was hugging the radiator and Taylor laid next to it and put her feet on it) then went to the bus stop to head to the airport. It was a little over an hour and when we got there we ran into Ashley Ranniger and Brigitte Newman! I just knew I’d see someone we knew on the trip J Checked in then had the craziest experience – there was no line and no assigned seating so it was a free for all of people literally elbowing and boxing out to get to the plane first. Nuts. Creepy dude ended up sitting next to us. Anyway, went to the Avenida America bus station from the Metro because Julia said that’s the one she always takes but apparently they closed the route to Granada a year ago so we paid for two more Metro tickets and went to Estacion Sur. So annoying and this is the worst part of traveling. So we got our tickets and then started our horrible ride back. There were these really rude people behind us who refused to let us recline our seats. Also, they absolutely STUNK so we’re pretty sure they were homeless and only used the bus to sleep. Obviously I didn’t get much sleep sitting straight up then finally got in around 4:30. We got a taxi to our apartment but the guy didn’t really seem to know where he was going. We changed into clean clothes and crawled in a comfy, warm, clean bed for the first time in about 10 days. Ahhhh…
