Salutations de Paris!

Je suis en Paris!!!  I took a bus from London to Dover 2 days ago, then I took a ferry from Dover to Calais.  The ferry ride was absolutely amazing; I felt so cultured and European cruising from country to country while having a snack in the dining room and gazing at the ocean.  I arrived in Calais in the early evening with no real plans, but I managed to find a hostel.  The hostel was fab because I slept on a non-bunk-bed for the first time in forever!! Also it was only 2 people to a room- lovely! My roommate was a charming middle-aged school teacher from Australia.  We wound up spending the next day together checking out the sights in Calais.  Calais is gorgeous and I got up super early to walk around for many hours before taking a train to Lille.  In Calais I had my first french cafe, french baguette, and french crepe whilst in France; it was delightful!  I also saw parks, gardens, statues, and got to practice my French some more.  I'm glad because my French has degraded really badly in the last 6 years and I really need to immerse myself to get it back up to snuff.

Lille is also gorgeous.  The train ride was amazing because I got to see a bunch of the French countryside.  Sadly when I got to Lille I found out that the only two hostels in town were all booked up (blast this having no regular internet access!).  I walked around the centre-ville of Lille for a few hours and then took a train to Paris.  I arrived in Paris in the late evening and had somehow lost the number and address of the hostel I wanted to stay at.  I got the information ladies to look up the number in the phone book for me, but it wound up being the wrong number!  I was looking despondent by the pay-phones when a hunchback man came up to me and offered to show me to an internet cafe where I could look up the phone number.  We got to the cafe just as it was closing, but I managed to convince them to let me dash in and look up the number.  I got the number, called the hostel and got directions.  I finally got to the hostel at least an hour after arriving in Paris and managed to check in sans-problem.

The adventures of my crazy day didn't end there, though.  In the hostel kitchen I met two Aussie blokes (Matt and Guy) who call me Muppet because of my hair (or mupples, or muppie, or mup-tup, etc) and we decided since we were all new to Paris we had to get some wine and go find the Eiffel Tower.  We got 3 bottles of wine, walked over to the tower, and managed to sneak past security and climb onto the cement base to where the steel beams actually start.  We lay on the cement base looking up at the tower for hours just in awe of the fact that we were in Paris drinking wine on the eiffel tower and that life could not possibly get any better.  Today I had to get up super early for breakfast and then spent many hours wandering the city with the Aussies and a guy from Texas that I met this morning.  I'm back at the hostel now watching Lord Of the Rings, of all things, and not sure if I'm going out or not tonight.  Yesterday pretty much counts as 5 days, so I'm thoroughly exhausted.