Our first night in Paris was a perfect prelude to our two-week stay.
After a delayed flight we finally landed at 4:30 and endured the Parisian traffic for a good hour before arriving at our hotel. Because of our setback during the first half of the day we only had 25 minutes to get dressed up for dinner, (we were notified by our teachers that dinner would be a formal affair), and the Belloy Saint Germain’s unaccommodating tight spaces didn’t exactly help our situation. To illustrate just how small the hotel is Franklin had to stack her suitcases on top of one another and take her backpack off in order to fit just herself in the elevator. Her last words?
“I’m not making it out of this elevator alive.”
By the time Liz and I stumbled into our room, we only had 15 minutes to get ready. We threw our luggage down, dropped trou’, got dressed and hauled ass to the bus that was waiting for us a few blocks away.
On our ride we were so star-struck by the sights; the Eiffel Tower and the Place de la Concord just to mention a few, we didn’t realize that our bus pulled into a port on the Seine River.
A dinner-cruise in Paris is definitely rolling up in style and getting there 20 minutes late ups it to being fashionable. Once seated three waiters served us hors d’oeuvres and surrounded us with bottles of wine, glasses of champagne and Chombard, (my favorite liqueur), and liters of Evian. (Who drinks tap water anyway, we’re just way too classy.)
We most definitely wined and dined as the waiters kept replacing empty wine bottles with full ones, and the sights were so outstanding that we were simply thunderstruck, yes thunderstruck at the whole experience!
We were all feeling prettttyy good by the time Liz finished an entire bottle of red and dessert, a flaming plate of Crepes façon Suzette, was served, that we all got up and ended the night with a Delaware and creepy 40 yr. old men dance party under the Eiffel Tower.
All in all, was a very very good night.
By the way, the first thing I heard when I landed in Paris: “Ooh la la”, unsurprisingly spoken by a French construction worker… I love it here.
Postscript: No Allie Franklins were hurt during our stay in Paris. Just a stolen wallet but that’s another story.
