Gurrr! I was on my flight back to Sydney, writing a great post which summarized my entire Europe trip and my last day in Paris, aaaaaaaaaaand then my phone died. My phone is the source of my motivation, so I've been unable to reproduce the post until now. In case you guys don't know, my memory is really crap so a lot of what I write could be slightly inaccurate or a complete lie. Here goes:
I'm pretty sure I arrived in Paris by mid afternoon at a train station which I'm pretty sure was smack bam in the middle of Paris - probably only a few meters away from the Eiffel tower. It was raining and my train was late, so I made my way to Marine's place as fast as I could. After swimming through the busy wet streets I finally arrived at her place. Sadly I needed a password to enter the apartment (which I didn't have) so I decided to go to the nearest store to get WiFi to contact Marine virtually. The place next door was a fancy upper class beauty parlor, and I'm pretty sure I could smell the French receptionist's panic as I walked through door drenched in mud and rain water. She started saying something in French which i'm sure translated to "I'm sorry sir, we can't clean you - no one can" before I interrupted her saying in English that I just needed WiFi.
I met up with Marine shortly afterwards and she led me to her awesome studio apartment. We made an awesome quiche for lunch and then headed out to see the city. First stop I think was the church called "sacre coeur" (no, i didn't remember that, I needed to look it up). It was a very large beautiful building which has a perfect view of the rest of Paris. There were donation boxes everywhere claiming that generous donations were the only source of income for the church - bullshit?
After visiting the church I felt like indulging in sinful behavior so we decided to go to the nearest pub to get drunk. We went to some awesome gamer paradise pub with plenty of Game of Thrones, Star Wars and V for Vendetta posters and props. I went up to the counter to order Marine a Guinness and myself an interesting sounding drink called a "monaco". I pulled the best poker face ever once I realized that a monaco is an extremely girly drink with hardly any alcohol in it. I even took a manly gulp of the Guinness in front of the bar tender so she'd be sure to think that the girly drink was for Marine - sorry Marine, I had to do it.
We ended up walking back to her apartment after the pub because there had been a bomb threat in the subway, and consequently the whole subway had been closed. Even though people definitely seemed to be more frustrated than scared, you could still since a tad of fear lingering around Paris after the whole Charlie Hebdo shooting.
We got back to the apartment to cook an awesome dinner featuring the highly anticipated spaetzle! That's right, I finally tried it! We spent the rest of the night listening to great music, eating fondue as the main, devouring cheese and bread for desert, and drinking plenty of fine red wine. What an awesome end to a great trip?!
