Paris!
Finally found some breathing space in my 1 hour free period to blog a little... thought it might be nice to write down some thoughts/experiences about Paris.
Had a 2-3 hour train journey down to Paddington, tubed to Waterloo and wandered around for about an hour. Other than the purchase of a pack of Millie cookies (no, not me this time. I was prepared with Tesco ones already), a raspberry ripple muffin and a pair of gloves by the respective needers, there wasn't much going on. What did annoy was that we had to go through the same proceedures of X-raying baggage, taking off overcoats in the cold, wait in line of the queues etc. etc. Like we don't have enough of that stuff at airports already.
Inside Eurostar... Left to right: Alison, Maddie, Chris, Rachel, me, Sezly. Nice mirror, no?
Eurostar was very lovely - big, spacious seats that can slide out, electrical plugs... A pity the windows were ultra reflective, though, since it made it more than a little difficult to take photos of the scenary outside. On the brighter side, they made excellent mirrors whenever we travelled through the tunnel. We arrived at Paris at around six, were whisked off to the hotel by Metro (Paris underground) save for a slight delay as two members of our little party were lost. Ten minutes to dump down bags and refreshen up before we headed to the crepe restaurant.
The crepes were excellent, and my personal favourites (though I only ate 1 savoury and 1 sweet crepe) are as follows:
- savoury: trapeze (ham, cheese and pineapple), montege (I think is the name, Alison's, with bacon, fresh cream and onion), smoked salmon with lemon and fresh cream
- sweet: lemon and sugar, nutella (though a tad sweet), the Ringling Brothers (ice cream, chocolate and pear)
Feeling a tad peckish now. Anyways. The teachers decided it would be a brilliant idea to walk to Notre Dam in the freezing cold (-5 C, or 23 F), when everyone was clearly underdressed for the walk, and so we embarked on a two hour walk around the centre of Paris' attractions. We saw the Louvre, the palace/art gallery place (with the glass pyramid), the French cultural centre, and the river. There wasn't exactly enough time to stop to take photos, so most of the photos taken on the run are blurry.
Top to bottom, left to right: French cultural centre, bridge to le Louvre, palace with pyramid place, Alison and Sezly being cold, another one of Paris' attractions whose name I've forgotten, Alison, Chris and Sez at the palace with pyramid.
As expected, since the teachers kept pushing ahead without really looking back, three of us (Chris, Maddie and I) were stranded at a double crossing, just opposite the Notre Dam, while the rest of the group moved on. Since we were heading back to the hotel anyway (t'was 11 by then), we walked back. Then the teachers called when we were at the hotel to ask where we were, and when we heard they were all waiting for us outside for at least a quarter of an hour, we went "uh oh". Needless to say, we all felt very bad about it, and everyone else was frozen and bad-tempered by the time they arrived. The teachers, or rather the French teacher, grilled us about why we didn't call and so on. What surprised both the teachers and us was that we didn't see each other on the way back, which meant we were ahead of them. That was a ridiculous proposal, since they had clearly gone on, so in the end the teachers just told us to apologise to everyone in the morning.
Went to bed at 12, didn't sleep very well all night, and had to wake up at 6 for the conference. We ate breakfast (croissants and small baguettes), and went travelled on the Metro for three quarters of an hour, or thereabouts, before we arrived at the conference hall. What's annoying is that the waiting area outside was packed full of... well... English school students. Um, excuse me? A conference in France about the future (okay, "Our Future") of the EU targetted solely at UK students? Very disappointing. We went in anyway (not like we had a choice), and... well... the auditorium was huge. It could literally seat a thousand odd people.
This is not even a third of the auditorium. If you look closely behind the black curtainy things, there are seats. And in front of where I took this photos there were another twenty rows. Then there are twice as many seats shown on the picture to the left of the picture - in other words, what I've taken is just a third of the length of the auditorium. And there was 70% or so seats filled during the conference. That's a lot of people and a lot of organising. Respect, man, respect.
The conference started off with a brief introduction, followed by a talk on the past, present and possible future of the EU and its roles and importance, given by a very federalist (globalist, even) speaker. Then there was a talk about Make Poverty History and how EU should manage development funds, its current failings and so on, which... I personally found a tad dull and overly long. A break of ten minutes, then there was a talk where a woman, head of a lingual training company, repeated again, and again, and again, the same point that languages were very important, and how people should take at least three languages, and how people shouldn't rely solely on English. Then there was a talk by a panel of four or so speakers furthering her point about the Erasmus and the Leonarde Da Vinci programmes which are aimed at pushing UK students to Europe to pick up languages. One speaker was fairly self-centred, and clearly didn't have anything to say as he rambled on about having a fan club as people cheered whenever he said he was from whatever university he came from (haha), how Paris' transport system is better than the UK (what?), and how skaters get to skate around streets of Paris for half an hour every Friday and how cool that was (...).
Then it was time for a 40 minute lunch, or rather 30 minutes by the time we got out of the auditorium. The food around the conference hall was quite amazing, and cheap compared to the UK (7 euros for a large panini + drink + huge dessert. That's about £4.5. ><), then we had to rush back into the hall. The talk that followed was, by general consensus amongst the fourteen of us, the best, about the euro, its importance and where it's got weak points. Then there was a question and answer session, fairly similar to Question Time, where there were MPs (Labour and Conservative, the first federalist speaker sat in for the Lib-Dem who was unable to make it), the Make Poverty History speaker and the speaker on euro.
The Labour MP in particular kept going off the questions (some of which sounded like the teachers had prepared them before hand and given it to their students to read out) to rant on about how brilliant Tony Blair was (for example when addressing a question unrelated to the rebate (paraphrasing): "We need to establish relations with the E. European countries, and Tony Blair has done this by directing some of the much needed money from our rebate to those countries. No one else has the GUTS to do this").
Anyway, we finished at around five, and had an hour and a half of "shopping" at the famous shopping mall called Bon Marche (translation: cheap). The misleading name became extremely jarring when I walked in to see, much to my surprise, Dior, Chanel and Gucci. As you can imagine, the prices were mostly out of reach for most of us. One person did pay 47 euroes (£30+) for a pair of gloves - lucky her, she can afford such things. We then popped back to the hotel, and realised that the reason why the people waiting for the three of us yesterday didn't see us was because... well... we discovered a shorter and more direct route to the hotel. Well, at least something better came out of it.
Another ten minute break at the hotel before t'was dinner time. This time we went to a fondue place, which was equally amazing, with cheese and chocolate... >< Makes me hungry to think of all that lovely, melted cheese. The meat fondue - that is, cooking meat in hot oil then dipping the greasy, delicious beef into various sauces - was also amazing, but I was a bit worried about hygiene, since the sauces sometimes came in contact with the blood from the raw pieces of meat.
Here's the blank space where a fondue picture should have been. Sorry, was too busy eating.
After the filling dinner, we went to a cafe to have drinks. Yes, we were allowed alcohol. Alison and Rachel thought it would be a good idea to try Mojito, which contained: strawberry, rum, mint, lemon. I opted out at the last minute, choosing the non-alcoholic "princesse" instead (mango, orange, several other juices). The mojito... was very strong. I sampled about two drops worth of the stuff and instantly gagged - could literally feel the stuff vapourising off my tongue. >< Dunno how Alison managed to drink all of it.
Bedtime at 12 again, except this time (thank the gods) we could wake up at 7:45 instead of 6. 7:45 instead of 8:30, because all three of us (Sarah, Rachel and I were sharing 1 room) were in dire need of a shower. Thus refreshed, we headed out into chilly Paris to take pictures of the Eiffel Tower, then embarked on a river cruise. It was a long river cruise - two hours, and about two-third of the photos I took came from there. I can name about two of the buildings out of the billions I took. So... let's let the pictures do the talking.
Not quite the Eiffel Tower, but I read somewhere pictures of the Eiffel Tower are all copyrighted to some random people, so to be on the safe side... here's Alison standing in front of what was her replacement for the Eiffel Tower... when she was ickle.
Lots, and lots, and lots of photos. Up to down, left to right: picture 6 is the glowy building on the bottom left in the Paris at Night pictures. Picture 7 and 9 (9 being bottom right) are photos of the Notre Dam.
Group photo! Left to right: Mrs Soiullac (spelling?), moi, Maddie, ?, Zoe, Alison, ? Rachel, Pip, Chris, Kate, Mil, Sarah, Holly, ?. Yeah, my name recollection is excellent. Mrs Dulthie was taking the photo. You can guess what's behind us (it wouldn't fit on an ordinary camera lens anyway).