Paris 1
Trip Start
Nov 14, 2008
1
13
102
Trip End
Feb 26, 2009
Paris,
France
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Brussels, the "Capital of Europe". Maybe the European Union felt sorry for Belgians that they needed to created a reason for people to visit Brussels, because there´s very little to do here. On our way to Paris, we had to change trains at Brussels, and decided to spent 2 hours or so here while we were already in the city. Right next to the train station, we saw literally chocolate shop after chocolate shop after chocolate shop. And exotic chocolates too, some shaped to look like the famous Manneken Pis statue.
It says something that the city´s icon is a fountain of a little boy pissing, and the statue´s only about a foot high. Tow, Deutsch and I wanted to get a photo of us recreating the pose (with clothes on of course), but we thought Mich would get jealous. The statue was disappointing to say the least. What we did enjoy, though, were the Belgian waffles. My one had chocolate sauce on the top, half dark, half white - the shop called it the "Obama Waffle".
We checked out Galeries St Hubert, a royal arcade which looked like a grander version of the Queen Victoria Building, but that took all of 10 minutes. We spent the next hour in a cafe filling time until the train arrived.
Paris Pub Crawl
We arrived in Paris in the late afternoon, when it was already dark, and decided to do Sandemans´s Paris Pub Crawl rather than tour around. For 12 Euro, we were promised discounted drinks at a number of bars, and unlimited vodka and orange shots. It turned out that the discounted drinks were the night´s specials available to everyone, and the vodka with orange juice was pre-mixed and carried in a flask by our "guide", so that we received only one drink of this after each bar.
At first it looked like it was just us 4 and these 2 Brazilian guys who were pretty social, which would have defeated the whole purpose of going out to meet many people on our first night in Paris. A few others joined half an hour late, giving Mich her desired female company, but not giving us our desired female company because they all came with boyfriends. I stayed for only 4 bars because the drinks were making me tired, and I planned for a busy day tomorrow. The others got back at 2am and enjoyed it a lot more than I did.
