Alright, first thing’s first, I guess… Paris.

We got into Beauvais airport at around 9am and after collecting our bags, we got a bus into Paris – the plan being from there, to get a metro to the hostel, drop our bags and meet Siobhan. Awesome.

Not awesome. The metro station, next to the bus station was PACKED – mainly with people having got of a number of buses. All different nationalities, shouting over each other, packing into what was a very small space.

There were Italian’s throwing their kids over the barriers, because they couldn’t get the pushchairs through. The metro staff really didn’t seem to care. We were in there for about 40mins, before we got a ticket.

Eventually though, we were on a metro and heading for the Aloha. When we got there, we checked in and packed away our bags in the cupboard and left again, heading this time for “Rue des Boulets” – The metro stop next to Simon’s apartment – to meet Siobhan.

Meeting Siobhan is never a simple process, she told us though,
to wait at the metro stop and she’d meet us there. So we did. We sat on the bench, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Until, eventually, from across the street, came a woman riding a bicycle. She had arrived. We crossed the street and went to a small café and got something to drink. Not knowing the journey that lay before us. Siobhan had decided to take us to the park. The park, it turned out, was about an hours walk away. Off we went though, map infront of us showing us the way.

After the massive journey, we didn’t stay at the park for long. We headed back to the metro stop, and back to the hostel. Agreeing to meet Siobhan again later.

Back at the hostel, we got our bags and headed up to our room – it was, thankfully, smaller than what we’d booked. It was a 5 bed room, the other beds, it seemed, were already taken. One of our roommates, was there when we got there, a Slovakian called Mike. (I think) He told us his name and stuff, but I didn’t hear it right. Ryan says it was Mike though. There’ll be more about Mike later.

I called my mum, my phone had died earlier in the day, so as soon as it had some charge in it, I took the opertunity to let her know we’d arrived safely an’ all that jazz. While I was out of the room, Ryan had gotten into bed. Siobhan had said she’d call when she was ready to meet again, which she did, I woke up Ryan and we headed back to Rue des Boulets and again… waited…

She showed up, eventually and took us on a big ol’ walk to find a supermarket. On the way, she filled us with some fear, with things like “You should stop speaking English.” and tales of seeing a guy getting beat up on a subway train.

We bought some food at the supermarket and headed back to Simon’s, where she cooked us some food. I hadn’t slept since around 9:30am on Wednesday, it was now nearing midnight on Thursday night. So, understandably, I was tired. I’d slept for a bit on the plane, but not a lot.

Got back to the Aloha and tried desperately not to wake everyone up as we entered the room, then went to sleep.

The next day, I woke up pretty early and read for a bit – Ryan had finished High Fidelity in Prestwick airport, just before we left, so I took it and read it over the weekend.

I then woke Ryan and we headed off to Disneyland. Last year we didn’t pay for the RER to Disney, not because we were out to con the Parisian train system out of a few euros, but because we didn’t realise we had to pay as we left Paris – the metro day pass lets you through the barriers which gets you down to the RER platform and at Disney, we’d tried to buy tickets, but couldn’t work the machines properly and ended up with 5 metro tickets – tickets that were of no use to us.

This year, we decided to be good people and pay for our journey… that was until we found out the price. €6.50 1-way. Meaning we would have been 26€ for the two days. Fuck that. We used our metro ticket to get us onto the RER platform in Paris…

At the other side, a french guy, obsessed with the rain seemingly let us follow him through the barriers. From the station, we headed to McDonalds, ate and then headed to the Studios park
and straight onto Crush’s Coaster.

I don’t think either of us had any high hopes for the coaster being that great, but it was the closest to the park entrance, so we went for it.

After a fairly long queue, it actually ended up being pretty cool. The basic idea being that you sat on a turtle shell as you went for a ride through the East Australian Current. The shell spins around as you go.

From Crush, we went to the Tower of Terror, which as a ride doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why would you be staying at an abandoned hotel, why would you agree to go up in a service elevator? I mean, sure, the ride’s good. But why does the service elevator have seats? – Seats with seatbelts, no less. It’s almost like they were expecting something bad to happen.

We then headed to the RockNRollerCoaster avec Aerosmith, then as part of our Aerosmith double-bill, we went to see the Armegeddon Special Effects thing. Which was weird. You were basically taken onto a set of a space station, whereby it was then hit by loads of astroids/meteors and you were supposed to be… acting scared? Im not sure. There was just a lot of stuff happening with not much explanation.

We went on the park’s little Backlot tour thing, which was pretty cool, but also seemed very… empty. They had a couple of big set pieces, but it seemed they were making a much bigger deal of it than what it actually was.

We also went and saw a car stunt show.

We did all the big rides twice (RockNRollerCoaster, Tower of Terror and Crush’s Coaster) – On the second time with Crush though, we went in and made it almost to the end of the queue, when the ride broke down, leaving people stranded throughout.

We were told it could be around 20minutes before it was fixed and that they had to get the people out from the middle of the ride. We waited and waited… The atmospheric lights were turned off, in favour of brighter, more practical lighting. It kind of ruined it all. Eventually though, the ride was fixed, which brought on cheers from the queuing crowds.

After that though, we left the park (it was the plan, we weren’t annoyed) and headed to Rainforest Café – We were seated straight away and given menus, which we promptly opened up.

The cheapest meal was around €19. Ryan picked out a burger which came to €19.90 and I picked out the one thing on the menu which appealed to me at the time, which was some Turkey escallop thing with spaghetti and cheese… Im not sure… it came to €19 though – added onto that was two cokes at €5.90 each. (500ml cokes) – Anyways, I sorta picked my way through my meal, eventually giving up at less than a third of the way through. We asked for the bill, to which the waiter asked me “You not like?” (in a sort of angry, french accent) – “no, sorry…” I replied. He took my plate away and then, after a few minutes, came back over with our bill “I’ve taken the price of your meal off the bill, because you didn’t like it.”

Awesome!

We then headed for the station and jumping the barriers, headed for the Louvre.

The Louvre is free on Friday nights to under 25’s, we only really went in to see the Mona Lisa – which was surprisingly hard to find. “first floor.” it said, we followed signs. Until there were no more signs, except for back the way we came. Also, the ‘first floor’ is up several flights of stairs, because you go like, underground from the pyramid. We found it though, eventually…

It was stupidly protected and I can’t really see what it is that makes it so great, so loved… but I’m glad we saw it, if only so we can say we saw it. However… On the opposite wall from the Mona Lisa there is, a massive painting which pretty much covers the entire wall on which it’s hung. I realise this may not be a common opinion within the art community, but I’m of the opinion that bigger is better, therefore the painting opposite the Mona Lisa, the painting you can go up to and touch if you want is surely a thousand times better than the postage stamp that is the Mona Lisa, surrounded by her glass casing and barriers. We had a look through the museum, saw the Egyptian stuff, before leaving. It would be cool to explore further, we barely saw anything of the actual museum, but I still felt we’d seen heaps.

From the museum, we headed back to the Hostel and to bed.

The next day, Saturday, we woke up and headed to Disney again. Again, using our metro tickets to get onto the RER platform in Paris and jumping the barriers at the other side. Having been to the park last year, we decided to take advantage of the fastpass thing. It was good, insomuch as it meant we never had to queue longer than 5/10 minutes for a ride, which in turn made the ride more enjoyable, because there wasn’t a massive buildup to it. However, it just meant that instead of queuing, you we were left to kill time in the park itself. Which wasn’t always that easy to do. However, we got around everything a lot quicker and were out of the park pretty early.

We headed back to the hostel and chilled there for a bit before heading off to meet Chris and Pascha (Chris’ bird), we were meeting them and walking with them to find Siobhan. She was playing at Le Kibele – A restaurant/bar/venue place. It was pretty cool and she was good, as were the other bands that played (all french). We hung around there for a bit, but ultimately left pretty early and went back to the hostel.

The next day, we were practically chucked out of the room – there’s a lockout thing from 11am-5pm. I spoke to Slovak guy for a bit, it was his last day. He was off to the Louvre, then heading to Milan next, before going home.

We quickly got dressed and headed out to meet Siobhan, Chris, Pascha and Wilson at Rue des Boulets. We went to the supermarket and bought some food, me and Ryan bought food at least, Ryan, along with the others, also bought some extremely cheap wine and lots of it and we headed to the park (the same one as before) and everyone got drunk. Everyone except me – passers-by could have been forgiven for not realising this though, as I tried to stand up.

It didn’t so much work as planned. I’d been sat cross-legged for a while and had obviously cut off the circulation for my foot/feet. So, when I tried to stand up, my feet couldn’t support… anything and I just fell right back down again.

I then waited a minute or so and tried again. Nope. Fell down… Again. I decided just not to try again, until I knew I was definitely gonna be able to stand, so, as everyone around me laughed (rightly so, hell, I was laughing too) I waited for the feeling to return to my feet.

They played a bunch of drinking games at the park, everyone getting extremely drunk. Until Siobhan had to go back to Simon’s apartment.

We all went along with her and her and Simon left us there while they went off to see some opera thing. Ryan passed out on the couch (after passing out on the toilet) and Chris, Wilson and I chatted on the balcony for a bit. After around 3 hours, Ryan woke up. Not knowing how he’d gotten from the park to the apartment and generally not knowing where he, or anybody else was. We were there for a few more hours, drinking resumed when Simon and Siobhan got back. Then at around 00:15, we were told that the last metro was in like 15 mins. So Ryan and I left as soon as possible, catch the last metro trains back to the hostel – for we are kings of the metro!

On the last day, we woke up and packed up all our stuff and went down to reception and checked out. Leaving our bags, once again, in the cupboard, we headed to the Eiffel Tower. Instead of just going to the tower, as we had done last year (because we had no intention of climbing it again) we decided to go across the river, to see it from that angle. Seeing the tower, something sort of clicked into place. A couple nights beforehand, the tower had been shining bright blue. We had asked Siobhan if she knew why, but it’s Siobhan and she doesn’t know much about her surroundings. However, attached to the tower were big gold stars. It became apparent that the blue was to create the look of the EU flag – The french have EU Presidency.

From there, we headed to the Arc De Triomphe and this time climbed it. This marked the first and only time I needed to use my inhaler on the trip. Which I thought was pretty good, given that I actually got to the top (well, the exhibition room) before stopping/needing to use it. From there, we headed down the Champs-Elysées stopping off for something to eat, before sitting at the Louvre fountain for a bit. We had to meet Siobhan again and so were killing time before heading to Rue des Boulets to wait for her. In the mad rush to catch the last metro back to the hostel the night before, I’d left my camera at Simon’s, so we had to meet Siobhan to get it back.

We sat waiting for ages, until I eventually saw her walking down the opposite side of the street, towards the crossing. Instead of crossing though, she, instead, went down into the metro. Quickly, we ran down into the metro, to find her. She was at a ticket machine. We walked over and stood behind her. It took a couple of seconds, but she noticed us and confessed that she’d completely forgotten. She gave me my camera and we parted ways. We headed for the Sacré-Coeur. On the way up, we stopped off at one of the tourist shops and bought some things, before heading up to the place itself. Both ways, we were subjected to the thread guys. We sat there for a bit, before deciding to go try and find the Statue of Liberty.

I’d seen the Statue of Liberty on the maps last year and had since seen it in the film classic that is National Treasure 2 – Book of Secrets.

Slovak guy had mentioned it when Ryan had asked him what he’d done one day. Ryan had said he was pretty sure he was mistaken, afterall, Statue of Liberty is in NYC, non?

We got the metro back to the eiffel tower and walked from there, the walk proved to be longer than expected though. I saw it from the metro train and knew it was on an island. But how did you get to the island?

We walked down the road and eventually found it, we crossed a bridge, on what turned out to be the wrong side which meant having to run across the road, avoiding french traffic, to get to the other side and the steps that took you down onto the island.

From the Statue, we walked the length of the island and up the other side, onto another bridge and then walked back to the Eiffel tower. This time, walking underneath it and sitting at the other side for a bit, before eventually deciding it was time to collect our bags from the hostel and head to the bus station again.

The rest of the journey’s went off without too much hassle. Once back in Glasgow, we went and visited CC, Logan and Bobby for a bit, before heading to Stirling.

The next day, I messed around online for a bit, went into town with Ryan, then eventually went to Glasgow on the train and met Heather, Claire and their friends. We went for something to eat and then to the cinema, after the cinema we all went for a drink. Most of the group left, and we went back to Heather’s.

At Heather’s I tried to sign onto her wifi, but it wouldn’t work. I opened my browser though, to try something and I was presented with a Cloud WiFi login page. So I used that. I woke up the next day, Heather had left for work, I had planned to go into town and get some stuff then come back for my bag, but instead I just lazed around there for a bit. I then packed up and headed to HMV to get a few DVDs and then Waterstone’s to get a book and give Heather her keys before heading to the Station. I got teh train back to Stirling and my mum picked me up at the Station, with both dogs in the car.

On the way home we stopped at the motor grill, finally getting back to Elgin around 8pm or something. However, once back in Elgin, I wasn’t home.