Eurotrip 2014: A Belated Telling

Hey! So this is a little belated, but here is an article I wrote for Peace Corps Senegal's quarterly magazine, the Sabaar, back in May!

 For two weeks during the end of May and beginning of June, I took a casual Eurotrip with my fellow PCVs Courtney Ruble (Kolda) and Anna Adams (Matam). Courtney and I took went to London while Anna and her boyfriend, Dan, took a trip to Barcelona, only to meet back up in Paris. Courtney and I decided on London after procrastinating too long and ultimately deciding we really just wanted to speak English and eat a lot of cheeseburgers (spoiler: we did both).

This was my first trip out of Senegal since arriving in March 2013, so our first stop was to get Egg McMuffins in the airport. Since I was in charge of booking the hostel reservation, the obvious choice was a cute little place right around the corner from the British Museum. Courtney didn't mind because there was also a Starbucks. We spent a day in the museum, strolling through most of the Acropolis, admiring hijacked mummies, and weaving through tour groups. We also sprinted past Westminster Abbey,
Big Ben, London Bridge, and the Tower of London on our way to BLTs and pints of beer.

    While I was sad to leave the English, my bank account was not, and so we took the high-speed train under the English Channel to la belle Paris. This time Courtney was responsible for booking the hostel, and while the hostel was clean and had private bathrooms, it was located in the Vietnamese Red Light District and therefore a little worrisome. Making fun of Courtney later, I looked up
reviews online and found one from a gentleman who encouraged us "not to look them in the eye." Great advice!

     We sucked it up, however, and walked 8 blocks to a movie theatre where we watched Maleficent (IN ENGLISH), while eating some of Ben and Jerry's finest ice cream. Note to travelers: it is not a good idea, after wearing flip flops for over a year, to purchase any form of fancy footwear while on vacation and then walk in them to the movies. This will most likely result in horribly sore feet that will plague you for the rest of your vacation. Your friends will probably still make you walk everywhere, since they're sadistic, but support you when you try to numb your pain with boissons.

 Unfortunately for our Vietnamese friends, Anna and Dan didn't want to stay in a hostel, so we moved to an Airbnb apartment. I would highly recommend Airbnb. I thought it was reasonably priced and the apartment owner gave us a tour and left us with some restaurant choices before kindly getting out of the way. We had our own space, a great bathroom with water pressure and hot water, and a kitchen with a fridge and stove that we could hypothetically use to cook.We were also conveniently located near the metro, two grocery stores, and numerous restaurants that stole all of our attention away from the kitchen. The apartment was wonderfully furnished, but the best parts were easily the washer/dryer and insanely fast Internet. While we never quite figured out the dryer part, it was much more efficient than hand washing. Now, it would be impossible (and kind of dull) for me to recap every site we went to see, because we saw all of them. Nine days in Paris gave me 10 extra pounds (suck it, Jim Courtright) and a lot of pictures of French monuments. I will say we climbed a lot of
things. Every time we saw a church, or a monument with stairs, for some reason it was necessary that we climb it. At Notre Dame, none of us particularly wanted to climb it, but instead of saying that, we decided to stand in line while we made our decision. No one ever made that decision, so we still climbed Notre Dame. The only thing we didn't climb was the Eiffel Tower, because that had an elevator and we are very hardcore tourists. In case you were wondering, yes we all have rock
hard thighs now.

We couldn't go to Paris without going to the Louvre, and we spent a whole day there. Not wanting to
miss out on any education, we all got really patron "headsets" that were actually "Game Boys." (Fun
fact: there's a Game Boy game for the Louvre.) You could click on items you wanted to learn about,
pulling up the history of the object as well as the time period from which it came.As anyone who has been to the Louvre will know, she's exhausting. There's so much stuff to see, it's exhausting

At the top of something

Just Louvin Life

to try, and it's also exhausting to accept the ultimate defeat. We kept ourselves going with puns: "I want toLouvre it Louvre it." "I'm Louving it." "Louvre free or die hard." "#yolouvre." "Louvre until you can't Louvre no more." We did Louvre until we were exhausted and hungry, so we meandered over to a cafe in the Louvre. Now we were expecting ridiculous prices. Fine, it's worth it to not have to leave the building. But we were expecting to get full. The sandwiches were something from a Senegalese establishment, just a baguette with a little meat and vegetables. The penne pasta chicken, which our dear Dan was so excited for, had very little penne, pasta, and chicken. And the milkshakes were sub-par. Needless to say, trying to Louvre on a half full stomach is difficult, but we pulled through and sprinted past an impressive number of exhibits.

Versailles garden

Look Mom, I'm a goat!

Another big day was our trip to Versailles. The gardens were in full bloom, and every other tourist in the entirety of France (I'm assuming) also came out. We ran through the bedrooms, meandered through the ballrooms, gazed up at portrait upon portrait of French victory after French victory, and didn't chat too much. Dan and I didn't even realize we’d seen the Hall of Mirrors until after the fact, and no one else was really up to go back. I thought it'd have more mirrors. After we were done with
the walk-through, we headed out to the gardens, which were beautiful, and took lots of pictures imitating the very serious statues throughout the garden. Some might think this was immature, we thought it was funny.

What trip to a European city would be complete without a bar crawl? Not this one, so we dutifully Googled "bar crawl Paris" and signed up for the first one. This, it turned out, was questionable shopping. We got off the metro, gazed around, and realized we were in the Red Light District of Paris. The sex shop/XXX movie theatre ratio per block was out of this world. We also got to see the world famous Moulin Rouge, which of course was ridiculously expensive, and even our bar crawl
leaders couldn't get us in.

We managed to go most of the trip without actually going to the Eiffel Tower—just gazing at it across the horizon from whatever monument we climbed that day. I took a lot of Eiffel Tower pictures; no skyline picture of Paris seemed complete without it. Our trip ended, however, in it's shadow as we celebrated Anna "Grandma" Adam's 26th birthday with a cruise down the Seine. We drank French wine, ate escargot and cheese and varieties of meat (none of them green),and had semi-wonderful service from a waiter named Sebastian. It was a great way to celebrate Anna's birthday, and a great way to end a great trip with great friends.