Day 1: The metro station that wouldn't let us leave

When we got to the airport in Rome it seemed like everyone wanted us to have fun. First, the woman at the check-in desk told us to have fun, sounding as if she loved Paris. Then, the person at the security said “oh Paris, enjoy!” making it sound as if Paris was the place to be. So this trip started out well, with everyone wishing us a great time in Paris.

When we arrived in Paris we got our metro tickets and hopped on the metro to our apartment. Everything was going well until we got off the train and tried to leave the station. We walked to the turnstile and tried to push through, as you normally would when leaving the metro station, but it stopped us. We all just kinda stared at it for a little bit, trying again and again to leave, but it wouldn’t let us. Then we saw some locals going through by scanning their tickets, so we tried that. But it still wouldn’t let us leave. So we followed some people out and we were finally able to leave. We couldn’t stop laughing as we walked out, wondering how in the world we could get locked in a metro station. We understood that you had to have a ticket to get in, since that’s how it normally works, but why would you need a ticket to LEAVE?? That doesn’t make sense at all. We later found out that the ticket we had (from the airport) only let us out within zone 1 of Paris, and we were in Zone 4, where the ticket didn’t work. Craziness, but whatever-it was a fun adventure. The metro stations themselves are more confusing than a maze at first. We finally figured it out, but even after 3 days of taking the metro places it was still a bit confusing at times.

Another thing about France: Not knowing French was weird and made us all want to learn French. We also realized that it's not a language that you can teach yourself like Italian or Spanish cause you need to know when and when not to pronounce words, and that's not something you can figure out yourself-you need a teacher for that. We've also come to realize that French is mathematical:

indirect: the more letters are in a word, the less letters you pronounce

direct: the longer the word, the harder it is to pronounce.

After we settled in at our apartment, we took the train to the city and went to the Louvre. The Louvre is amazing; It’s ginormous and incredible and you really need to whole day to see everything there is to see there.

After the Louvre we went in search of crepes. It was a long search, for every place was pretty expensive, but then again, we were in Paris-everything there is expensive. But we finally found a nice little French café/restaurant so we stopped by there where we had crepes (I had jam and nutella crepes).

The Louvre Metro Stop: