June 5th – Paris, France

As we stepped out of the car, Ania and I felt wonderfully warm. A summer breeze would whip by every now and then, and to us, this was what summer should always feel like. At least… that’s what we thought until rain suddenly showered upon us, and we were soaking wet within a matter of seconds.

The maître took one look at our bewildered faces and laughed. “Paris is not very rainy, but it is known for sudden showers,” he explained in heavily accented English. “I’ve laughed at so many tourists; it is so funny to see their faces when it happens!”

I was just about to tell him that it wasn’t very nice to laugh at other people’s misfortunes, but Ania, who has a fondness of rain, looked excited, so I decided that it wasn’t worth it. Instead, I spluttered out a few incomprehensible words that even the other Americans wouldn’t understand and followed the maitre eagerly, determined to change out of my wet clothes as soon as possible.

After changing, Ania and I stared out of the window of our luxurious five-star hotel. “It’s kind of flat, don’t you think?” commented Ania. “Well, except for the few hills I see…” She pointed them out.

“Mmm, yeah, I guess so,” I shrugged. “It’s kind of hard to tell, actually… there are so many buildings! No wonder this city is so popular. I can see a few shopping areas from here.”

“Let’s go explore around for the whole morning,” exclaimed Ania, “and after that, we can go on a huge shopping spree!” I agreed to this idea, and we decided to go on a tour.

The first place we went to was a historical museum. Ania and I regretted this decision almost immediately – we were bored to death at the descriptions provided by the tourist guide, whose words were so monotonous that the only entertainment we had was mocking him. We did, however, catch a few things about Paris’ history:

The French Revolution had started in Paris, when a lawyer jumped on a café table and furiously demoted the king’s dismissal of an honest minister. This sparked a motivation for the revolution. It was known as one of the bloodiest and out-of-control revolutions: many extremists killed not only royalty, but anybody who was not actively participating in protesting. In the end, Napoleon Bonaparte stepped in and ended the revolution. He crowned himself emperor and decided that Paris would be the capital of France.

By the time we had escaped the museum, we were like the living dead. We stumbled over the steps as we exited; there were so many people crowding around the exit (proving how densely populated Paris is) and we were so tired from listening to that guy that we put on a zombie look. I noticed that many of the native Parisians excused themselves even if we bumped into them; they were as charming as I had often seen in the movies. However, Ania and I, tired and brain-dead, merely gave them a wide-eyed wide-mouthed fish look as we tried to remember how to reply something back in French.

“Je mir d’affame,” I complained to Ania. She looked at me, confused.

“That means…” she racked her brain as she tried to remember. “That means that you’re starving to death, right?” I nodded, and proudly told her that I had read it off some French pamphlet. She ignored that.

“Well, you’re just going to have to wait,” she said firmly as she dragged me off to the inside of the Notre Dame. “Anyway, you’re always starving. It’s only 11 o’clock! We can eat at 12, so come on!”

The Notre Dame had so much history! It was amazing to think that it had been made about 900 years ago. There were many other cathedrals, but we had no time to visit them all, and in any case, Ania and I were getting quite frightened of a group of dedicated Catholics who seemed a little pushy to convert us to their religion. Paris is clearly full of Catholics – which is not a bad thing, but we had our own beliefs and we preferred to stick with it.

After visiting that, Ania forced me to accompany her to see the Eiffel Tower. Her reasoning with me was, “Anyone who visits France MUST see the Eiffel Tower! No buts!” It was amazingly tall, but after a few minutes of gazing up at it, I felt that I should remind Ania about lunch, so we departed back to our hotel’s restaurant to try out authentic French food.

We questioned the waiter about what food Paris had to offer, and with a kind smile, he told us that Paris has a large variety of food from all the regions of France. This sounded exciting to both Ania and I, but we had no clue how to read the menu. In the end, Ania ordered Cargolade and I ordered Boeuf Bourguignon. Cargolade turned out to be land snails cooked with herbs, and Boeuf Bourguignon was beef stewed in red wine. It was a very… erm, exotic meal. It was also very good, despite how wary we were at first.

After eating our fullest, we tried to go shopping, but everything was so expensive. In the end, we just watched a long four hour opera – after all, France has many opera houses. That lasted the entire afternoon, but on our way back, Ania told me something interesting.

“Hey, did you know that Paris is well-known for its nightlife?” There was a gleam in her eye as she said it. “Want to go try it out later on tonight?”

Hmm. I have no idea why I agreed to that one. But I guess I have something else to look forward to!

Signed out,

Erin Wei Woolf

Author's Note: This was written for a project about traveling around 10 locations in Europe. We were required to write 10 different journal entries based on our little "travels," and my partner and I decided to split the work 50-50. So I did five entries, and she did five. Our entries combined together can be found on my website. These collections are only my entries. This one is the longest out of all the others I wrote...