Off To Finland: Eurotour

Something I fell in love with on Eurotour was those pastries with chocolate in them (name anyone?) they had them in almost everywhere we went at the breakfast buffets and the ones at our hotel in Paris were particularly delicious! We were going on a bit of a sightseeing tour today and first stop was the Palace of Versailles. In my journal it says VERSAILLES!!! It really was incredible, I wandered around with Ana and there was a lot of people but not as many as I expected. You get a free audio guide at the door and they are really informative and it was actually really fun to learn all about how the French royal family used to live back in the day. When we went back to the bus there was all these people trying to sell us stuff and they do not let up. Even if you give them no attention whatsoever they keep pestering you. A few times we would see a huge group of them sprinting in one direction and then you would see some police officers walking towards where they are running from. This happened a bit in Venice too.

The next stop was a photo stop for the Eiffel tower! I never had the big Paris dream like a lot of girls my age do but it was still so incredible to be seeing such a famous landmark! We took lots of pictures and then it started to pour with rain so the rest of the tour was in the bus. I admit I was drifting to sleep by then and can't really remember where we drove. Our group had a booking to go up the tower and when we got there we had to go through security gates and have our bags checked. Bit of back story now, it was freezing. It was rainy and cold and I had shorts and a light cardigan on, I'd decided I would bring my big Australian flag to keep me warm but then I forgot to take it out of the bus and had to buy a poncho at the gift shop. Back to the security, anyone who were carrying any country flags; had them confiscated. In a group of 80 or so exchange students from a handful of different countries, collectively we were carrying quite a few flags. All of them had to be thrown away, I was so glad I had forgotten my flag because that would have made me furious!

We headed up in the lift and then we had to wait a while to catch the 2nd lift that would take us the the very top. The view was incredible, even form the 2nd floor you could see the whole city sprawled out in front of you. We could see people riding their bikes and playing soccer and they were like ants! We finally got to the top and admired the view and took some photos before waiting forever in line to get back down. It is a lot of waiting and I think from when we started and to when we got back to ground it was about 3 hours but so worth it! The rest of the evening was spent trying to find some food. You would think this would be easy in a city as big as Paris but we had a hard time finding anything. Eventually we found a nice little Chinese place and then I finally got to sleep!