We didn't start the bloggin . . . it was always bloggin since the world was bloggin

Ladies and gentlemen . . .  let’s get ready to rummmmmmbbbbbbbllleee . . .  or blog, because that’s exciting too right ;)  So I am blogging from a very cramped bed on a train that is not moving in a Paris station.  That is a little teaser for an epic blog to come from Heather.  That will be the one after mine and trust me; you are going to enjoy it!!!  Until then, it will be my pleasure to once again take you through the amazing honeymoon adventure.  We have nicknamed it “the honeymoon you wish you had”.  So here we go . . .

Sunday morning we were diligent in getting up early and getting ready to go to church.  We had researched the address and location the day before so we knew when church was and where we needed to go.  First thing to go wrong was the fact that my white shirt got left behind in Canada during all the packing and repacking of the wedding.  So I just wore my nicest shirt and we headed out in the rain to church.  We get off at our stop from the metro and immediately we know we are in trouble when we both wanted to go in different directions.  We couldn’t print out a map and the one we have isn’t very detailed, so we were hoping it would be easy to find with the street address.  Every metro exit has a large map of the surrounding area, so we were hoping that would have the street.  Second thing to go wrong, the street didn’t even show up on the large map, so we had our memory of a large dot on a small map.  After searching for a while in the rain, we couldn’t find the church.  Heather had been there last time she was in Paris and she said it was super hard to find because there are no signs and on a very short side street.  So that was a fail.  Feeling sad that we had missed church twice now, we figured we would just get on with the day.

Our first place to visit was called “The Paris Story”.  It was on our Paris Pass and was a 40-50 minute movie that tells the history of Paris from the early Gaelic tribe that inhabited the island from before Christ to present day Paris.  That was something that both Heather and I are interested in and we finally got our fill of history.  Anyone wanted to know more about the early history and development of the city over time would like it. 

After the movie we had planned on going across the street to the Opera and taking a tour there.  Third thing to go wrong was that the auditorium was closed because of rehearsal.  It was at about this time that we were both feeling like we had had enough of trying to do these things we had planned and decided to just wing it.  We had a hop-on hop-off ticket from the Paris Pass so we decided to just jump on a bus and see the city from the top of a double decker.  We got to see all the major places in the city and only needed three sweaters to keep Heather from turning to ice. 

We got off at Notre-Dame and did a little walking around of Ile-de-Ste Louis. The island is right next to Ile-de-la-Cite which is where Notre-Dame stands.  St-Louis is where a lot of old buildings with beautiful architecture have been mostly untouched from newer style building.  It was neat to walk through, and that’s also where we walked right next to La Seine, the equivalent of the Thames for those unfamiliar with it. 

After our walk we returned to Ile-de-la-Cite and had some delicious ice cream and more crepes.  Heather eyed the salted caramel earlier and couldn’t hold back.haha We then headed to Le Pont d’Amour Eternellle, or the bridge of eternal love.  The pedestrian bridge linking the island to the south shore has thousands of locks locked to the railing.  The locks have the names of couples and dates and love sayings.  It was so neat to see from afar and even cooler up close.  Needless to say we bought a lock from a cute little Frenchmen on the bridge, signed our names, put the date, and locked it to the bridge.  We tossed one key into the river and kept one for each of us.  It’s definitely one of the coolest things we have done so far.  Maybe one day we will be back and our lock will still be there.  Some locks were the old, old style and others even had engravings on them.

Walking along the south shore or as they say “the left shore”, because that makes sense when you look on a map . . . we saw some paintings that were absolutely gorgeous of Paris.  They were the originals of oil on canvas.  We bought one with the Eiffel Tower in the background in black and white with red trees as accents.  We have been collecting prints of paintings from each city, but this is the first original we have.  Most of the south shore in lined with vendors selling art, books, souvenirs, and anything else you can think of.  After weaving from shore to shore we found a niche called St. Michel on the south shore.  It is in the Latin district, so called because university students study Latin in school there.  The area is filled with little shops and amazing food.  Each tiny restaurant has someone outside trying to coerce you into coming into their restaurant.  We were offered free wine from the place we decided to go to, but took the apple juice instead.haha most of the restaurants were either kebab places with their spit of meat rotating in the window, or a foreign food with skewers of giant seafood and meets in a display case for me to drool over.  We chose a Greek place and needless to say the food was amazing.  All restaurants offer a sort of shortened menu that you pick an appetizer, main course, and dessert all for one price.  I ended up having some amazing escargot in butter, pork sirloin in a blue cheese sauce, and crème brulee.  Heather had an avocado with shrimp and mayonnaise salad, lamb chops, and chocolate mousse.  As usual we had to wait nearly 20+ minutes for the bill, but we made friends with an Aussie couple and the man’s parents sitting next to us.  After a wonderful night, we headed home . . . but not before stopping for another crepe to top up the stomachs ;)

Monday . . . oh what a day . . . long story short, it was a brutal day.  We woke up to rain and it didn’t stop raining the entire day.  We had planned on going to the Louvre and walk the Champs D’Elysee, but after a few minutes outside and already having our feet soaking wet we decided to abandon that idea.  Instead we went to the train station because we had to make reservations with the type of train ticket we have.  We bought a flexi ticket, which means we can travel 6 days within a two month span in between France and Italy.  Everytime we want to take the train we just reserve a ticket and we are good to go.  Well here is where a bad day turns really bad.  The finer than fine print says there they have fees to make the reservation and that the reservation is mandatory.  Well the first train we try to book, Paris to Marseille, is full.  Well, it’s not really full, but they only allow so many people on the train with our type of ticket.  Oh, and bytheway, there are 7 trains leaving that day for Marseille . . . yup.  So we are pretty disgusted with that, but it gets better.  The only other option that would allow us to not spend an extra night in Paris at our own expense is to take an overnight train to Toulouse, then a local train in the morning to Marseille.  So not being happy with that, we see there is no other option, so we agree.  “So that will be 43 Euros, please”.  Yup, just for saying we are going to take this train they want over 60$.  At that point I storm out of the train station and to the nearest Wi-Fi (which is now McDonalds) and see if there is any way of getting a refund on the tickets and flying instead.  Long story short, there is too much red tape involved, not to mention the price to fly at the last minute is higher than what we would have paid if we had known about the train mess earlier.  We also have to make reservations for 5 more trips which is almost 400$ we were not expecting to pay.  Feeling overly frustrated and disheartened, we concede to the extremely stupid system of train travel and go to book the rest of our tickets.  When we get there we find out that we can only book 4 of the 6 trips because the other two have to be done locally.  Just add another nuisance to our travels.  It ends up costing us about 140$ for 4 reservations, better than expected but still disgusting.

So with that mess behind us we decide to just call it a day, get some food and go home (still raining like crazy and still soaked from the knee down.  We get some crepes, go to the laundry mat next to our apartment and wait for our clothes to dry.  Now at this point you would think the day was a write-off and nothing really bad could go wrong just doing the laundry, right?  Well we set the laundry to colours, which means in the rest of the world and according to their diagram that the temperature would be cold enough to not make our colours bleed to our whites.  Not in Paris!  Instead of heating to 60 like it said it would, it heats to 90 and when we take our clothes out, all the synthetic whites have turned completely green because my travel pants bled.  So picture our whites coming out green and wondering who put their clothes in with ours, until we realized what had happened.  So at this point I was expecting Heather to lose it and start packing to leave Paris, but instead she busts out laughing.  I guess everything had gone wrong and this was just too much to handle before unless you laughed it off.  So off we went to buy some bleach and by the end of the night our whites were a beautiful shade of yellow.haha  Yup, great day!  Now we did manage to salvage a little bit of it because the only English channel on TV was showing Anaconda 2 and Python.  Two very . . . ummm, epic . . . movies.  So we finished off the day with a marathon of snake movies before turning in for the night.