Studying sucks. There, I said it. Everyone thinks it anyways, especially during finals. AndWOW am I glad to be done with finals this semester, which could possibly be for what lies ahead in my final three weeks in Europe. I finished my last exam on Wednesday and spent the rest of the day saying my goodbyes to all of the people I've met in Ireland this semester :'( Shout out to DUNARAS VILLAGE!!! In the evening we went out to the King's Head pub for one final Guinness, and wouldn't you know it the final song I heard the band perform was Galway Girl and it rained on the way home. I think Ireland was saying goodbye to me as well as me saying goodbye to Ireland. So I packed and that was that (Lindsay, see you at Mick's for you to pay up on our bet!) :) Took my final flight on RyanAir too, and I am perfectly okay with that.
Story doesn't end there though; while it's the end of my experience in Ireland it is the start of a totally new adventure for Rachel and I as we start our journey off with a bang in Paris! We are Couchsurfing with an awesome dude named Yoann (pronounced Johan with a silent 'h') that Rachel already stayed with along with her two friends when they visited Paris in October. We got here late Thursday night and he brought us to a little ridge five minutes from his house so we could see the light show of the Eiffel Tower. What a nice host!
Today was our first full day here in Paris and wow is it breathtaking. Being able to see it for the first time from the window of the Metro train was even amazing, so you can imagine what walking up to it and standing beneath it feels like. It's just a huge beautiful thing. I don't even know how to properly describe something like that. It's one of those things that you just keep looking at. It doesn't change but you just keep looking at it, even when we were walking away both Rachel and I would glance back at it every so often. It is also totally different from the daytime to the night time. During the day it is like a copperish color, but at night it is lit up by hundreds of lights that give it a golden glow. It's really cool to see the difference between the two. I think between the two of us we got a solid fifty pictures of it, and that's on top of the ones Rachel already had from her previous visit. Here's the difference in color:
If you're wondering, the tower had a tribute to Nelson Mandela on the tower, it said his name and the years in which he lived. It's great that they do things like this for such an important person for the world.
We spent the rest of the day viewing the Arc de Triomphe and walking through the Champs-Elysees Street, which is the famous shopping area of Paris which houses stores such as Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, yeah you get my point lots of stores that cost lots of money. We can window shop though can't we? So we walked down through that street and through a Christmas market that is at the bottom side of the street which was great. Shop after shop of anything from handmade soap to gluhwein (which Rachel loves). I must say I am really excited to shop through all of the Christmas markets we will see in other cities like Vienna and Prague. They are just really cool to walk through whether you have any intention of buying something or not.
We then went and headed to eat some CHEESE! The other part I (and especially Rachel) am excited for. One of the things that you can order here at a restaurant is just a cheese platter in which they will serve a platter of various types of cheese with unlimited bread. So yes, of course we made a meal out of cheese and bread with a banana/nutella crepe for dessert. It's so much more enjoyable eating cheese when you don't have a mom yelling at you to stop eating all the damn cheese in the fridge! :) Hi mom.
It is after dessert where our story, of course, gets interesting. We almost headed back to Yoanns after a full 11 hours of doing Paris, but we decided to head back to the Eiffel Tower for a few more pictures, not that we needed them. After the photo op we headed down into the Metro to a station we hadn't been to yet, and may or may not have gotten on the wrong train... meaning we did. So by the time we finally got turned around and back to the station we were supposed to be at... they closed the entire line that we were supposed to be on to get back to Yoanns. -_- So we finally got it figured out that we could navigate back by taking a few connecting trains, and two hours later we walked in his front door to a smiling Yoann wondering where in the world we were haha. But all is well and it made for a good experience, so it's all good. This was only day one, and as interesting as today turned out, I can't wait for the rest of the journey. Just got an email from our hostel in Prague about a New Year's party that they host for us... so yeah this is going to be a fun ride.
- Zach
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