When we boarded our train, a boy that looked to be about our age got on beside us. He asked me for a piece of paper and started making a million phone calls. I was able to understand most of his conversation- he had just gotten through with an interview and was heading to St. Rafael for the weekend. On one phone call he switched from French to Italian, which Erin can understand a little bit of. She told me that he was talking about us and how we had told him that we were studying in Nantes and that I gave him a piece of paper. After about an hour of the ride we reached his stop. As he got off he handed the piece of paper to Erin. It was written in very awkward English and said, "girl, I think you are very beautiful and nice. Above all you are very pretty. I want to stay contact with you. Here is my number phone." I think we laughed about that for the rest of the ride.
About halfway through the ride there was a technical problem with our train. The trip was supposed to be 6 hours long but it ended up being 7 hours and we got to Paris at 11 PM. We took the metro and when we got to our stop we got lost. We had all of our luggage and were miserable from the long train ride so we finally flagged down a taxi. Well the taxi got lost and couldn't find the hostel which ended up being in a pretty sketchy part of town. Well we finally made it at about 12:30 AM and were exhausted.
Saturday morning we woke up pretty late and went and ate a very French picnic on the Seine. It was so nice! We had baguettes and cheese and turkey and wine. Afterwards, Erin had to go to a ballet that she had tickets for so I just walked around a part of Paris that I had never seen until 5:00 that evening when I had made reservations to take a wine tasting class. One of my future goals in to become a wine connoisseur so this class was very interesting to me! We tasted wines from the different regions of France, learned how to pair wine with food, how to read a wine label and lots of other interesting facts! I was the only one there by myself but it didn't matter because everyone was so nice! I loved it. Afterwards I met back up with Erin and we ate crepes before heading back to the hotel.
The set up of my wine class
Very sunburnt from Nice, but enjoying the wine class!
Sunday morning we had planned to go visit the Catacombs in Paris but May 1st is a holiday in France called festival de Muguet (which is a type of flower). Once we got to the Catacombs we realized that they were closed so we ventured into the nearby Luxembourg Gardens until we had to leave for our train back to Nantes. Unfortunately we didn't judge our time very well and thought we were going to miss our train. We ran all of Paris and in the metro and throughout the train station to make it on time. Well, sweaty and exhausted we finally did.
And now I am back in Nantes preparing for my final couple of weeks here! I cannot believe that it has gone by so fast. But I will be back in America on May 18th and can't wait to see everyone!! Pray for me during these last couple of weeks and for a safe flight home!
No comments:
Post a Comment