like a good rambley read which I have had to split into three blog posts - I just have so many pictures!
Summer 2013 was quite the whirlwind. Starting off quite tough for various reasons, things slowly but surely began to look up. After a week away in a lovely place in the south of Ireland called Kenmare with my family (and the boyf for a couple of days), one of my very best friends GG and I decided we were going to take a few days off and travel to Paris.
(Photo source - Tumblr, not mine)
Paris is one of my all time favourite cities in the entire world, I love the language, the fashion, the food, the people, the atmosphere, the beautiful views, the people-watching, the CROISSANTS - just everything really. We were so excited to go there together as the last time we went it was with both our families (10 of us altogether) and we were about 10/11 years old so didn't really appreciate it all and take it all in once we had left Disneyland - that part was all that really mattered to us at that age!
Day 1:
When we arrived in Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris we hopped on a train to go into the city centre. Upon arrival in the train station, on route to find our hotel (which literally turned out to be about 200 metres away from the train station) we instantly got lost. When we finally found our hotel we realised we had in fact walked past it about 10 times already - not realising it was there. In Paris, so many of the hotel fronts just look like shop windows - they are rarely grande buildings standing out on their own.
That night we strolled the Parisian streets and found our FAVOURITE café, Angelina's, which was closed but we were glad we knew where to find it for the next morning. We had pizza in a nearby restaurant for dinner and on our trek back from Angelina's, GG's shoe broke and an artist selling her work on the street had to give us some of her giant sticky tape to put it back together. To say we were in hysterics would be an understatement. We made a pitstop in a Hagen Daaz store for some ice cream and wandered down by the Louvre, where, at dusk, people come and waltz in the courtyard, strangers with strangers. It was amazing to see!
Day 2:
We really hit the ground running the second day - we had SO much we wanted to do and see and only a limited amount of hours in the day to do all of it! We started the day off with the world's best hot chocolate in Angelina's - it is literally the most amazing thing you will ever taste. It's like melted chocolate mixed with cream.. so delicious. I got the white chocolate one and GG got the milk chocolate one - both SO so good, verging on the hypnotic.
After recovering from our hot chocolate experience we strolled around for a bit and found les Jardin des Tulleries - a beautiful park/gardens which was hosting a colourful carnival that day. Being the grown ups that we are we decided to go on the carousel, and then on a pirate carousel ride that look very tame but actually ended up giving us whiplash and bruised hips. Book judged by cover? Absolutely.
After a quick pitstop in a nearby Ladurée store (the world's most AMAZING Macarons), we headed on to an area of Paris called Montmartre - a beautiful area, home to the famous Sacre Coeur Cathedral. There were about 500 steps up to get the cathedral and of course there was an Irish Pub half-way up, so we stopped there for a Pimm's and to rest our tired legs. Paris requires a lot of walking! Luckily we were able to go inside the cathedral once we got the rest of the way up, to see the wonderful old decor and intricate stained glass windows, but no photos were allowed inside as mass was being said at the time. The view of the city of Paris from outside the cathedral was magnificent - absolutely breathtaking to see it all from a height like that.
(I want to live in the above building, the second apartment from the top - how perfect?)
After taking tonnes of photos and wandering the beautiful streets of Montmartre for another while, dipping in and out of vintage shops and meeting a Turkish tourist who was giving out about the fact that the streets in Montmartre looked exactly like the streets in his hometown (not sure what the issue was with that, but he wanted to rant so we listened), and also asked us to redirect him to the vintage store we had just come from. Exhausted and starving we strolled around for a bit longer before coming across a beautiful little restaurant up a cobbled side street called "Le Petit Thai." The restaurant was really quiet and beautfiully decorated on the inside, and the food was amazing. I hadn't had specifically Thai food before so it was a new and positive experience for me to try it and love it! A perfect end to a wonderful Parisian day.
Stay tuned for part two and three of this blogpost - there are plenty more photos to come!
(Credit to Gráinne for some of these photos - I combined both sets of photos, mine and hers as I noticed some different ones in each of our photo collections!)
Thank you for reading!
Síofra
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