American Girls In Italy: Mama Mia! Quelle surprise!

Bonjour! Here's your blog from our adventures in Paris, France!

Let's see, where to begin? I guess we'll start with Thursday afternoon, when the fun first began. Katy and I skipped our Thursday classes to catch the train to Pisa and then hop a Ryan Air flight into Beauvais, France. From here we would then continue on to meet my mom in Paris. Travel was a little nuts to say the least, as it was Easter weekend and that is apparently THE biggest traveling weekend for all of Europe. Thankfully we made it to France without too many complications. The hour or so long bus shuttle from Beauvais to Paris took us though some beautiful French countryside that I was very thankful to have been able to see.

We finally made it into Paris around 8PM. Our shuttle bus dropped us off somewhere in the middle of Paris, leaving Katy and I to our own defenses to figure out how to find the hotel where we were to meet my mom. All I knew about where our hotel was that it was, "somewhere near the Eiffel Tower"... So, our newly developed city/street smarts directed us to find the nearest Subway and try and find the lines that went toward the Eiffel Tower. We knew that our hotel was somewhere near there, but beyond that, we were a little clueless. So we finally found the subway and, after some very appreciated guidance of some very helpful english speaking French people found our way toward what we thought was the closest subway stop. We got off, the tower as our North star... the only thing we knew was the follow it. Unfortunately, it wasn't all that helpful in leading us to our hotel, so I stopped at a very nice, 4 or 5 star hotel and asked one of the men standing outside in uniform. His job was probably really to do something like greet guests and take luggage, not direct young girls who speak very poor french to their 2 star hotels, but oh well. He ended up being rather helpful by giving us a map and a finger pointed in the general direction and we were off again. Not long after, we found the street and headed down it. We had just seen the sign of our hotel in the distance and crossed the street to enter the building when we heard a lady across the street speaking english to another person in a room upstairs. It was my mom! My mom was the lady on the street. I called out to her, whereupon she screamed and ran across the street to hug us. Soon we entered the hotel lobby where Katy asked who the person was upstairs that she was speaking english to. Before my mom could answer, the elevator door opened and we saw Katy's mom! She had surprised Katy and come with my mom to visit Katy. Screams and hugs were again shared for quite sometime until we all headed up to our rooms to put our stuff away before heading out for a late night bite and the beginning of lots of chatting and catching up.

Friday was our first morning in Paris, and we soon discovered that my mom and I and Katy and her mom had slightly different ideas of how we wanted to spend our time seeing the city, so we ended up splitting up for most of the day with plans of meeting up again later that evening for dinner at a little bistro/bar near our hotel. I discovered soon after arriving in France that my allergies were pretty bad due to all the blooming trees and flowers, so the first thing on my agenda in Paris was to find a pharmacy and get some medicine so I could breath again. Once I found this, I was good to go, feeling so much better. Thank goodness for allergy medicines!

We all bought tickets for one of those big double decker tour busses, the ones where you can sit inside or on the top and they provide you with the earphones that tell you all the little touristy facts in like, 10 different languages. It actually ended up being a really nice way to see Paris, because it's just such a large city, to try and see it all in just a few days by walking around would be really tough. So my mom and I spent some time on that bus and also checked out one of the largest shopping districts in the city. Katy and her mom spent most of their day hitting up some museums like the Louvre and other popular sights of Paris. The following day in Paris was spent visiting more museums and tourist hot spots of Pairs. I loved Paris! I didn't have nearly enough time here, so I'm definitely going to have to come back some day! There was still so many things that I didn't get to see, and so much food that I didn't get to try. I tried the cafe au lait and pain au chocolate one morning and was totally sold. But I guess I'll still have to return someday just to try escargot.

We didn't actually have any return tickets to get us from Paris to Florence, because once my mom and I found out that Katy's mom was coming along to surprise her, we thought the plans might change a little, so we figured we should leave some room for flexibility and just plan out what we wanted to do when we all got there. This might not have been one of our more intelligent ideas... as I previously mentioned, Easter weekend is one of the busiest travel weekends in the year in Europe, so for us to just expect to find a flight or even a train back to Florence turned out to be a rather far fetched idea. Originally I had really wanted to take trains all the way back to Italy so I could see the French countryside as well as the city of Paris, but we soon discovered that every train was booked full. In the end, we were lucky to even be able to find our flight out. Sadly however, this flight left early Sunday afternoon, so we didn't even have any of Easter Sunday to spend in Paris. We traveled that whole day, riding a bus, plane, and train all in one day before finally making it back to Florence.

All in all, I know I can truly say that it was a fantastic weekend for my mom and I, and I think Katy and her mom seemed to enjoy themselves as well. Even with all the stress in the last day to find our way back it Italy, it was still a great time.

I know one thing for sure though: Paris will be seeing me again sometime down the road, I think it'd be a great place to go back to, and I hope Mitchel is willing to come with, I really think you'd love it honey!

Here's a photo of me at a traditional French bakery near our hotel. This particular bakery is called Poilane, and I was really excited to see their shop, because this happened to be the same bakery that I had written a paper on last semester for my bakery development class. Their bread art in the window display was amazing, and I soon discovered after trying their baked goods that their actual products were equally as good.