Sat, 01 Nov 2003

author Liz	location Hamburg, Deutschland
posted 09:27 CET 13/11/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/France/France 2 ( all photos )

Eiffel Tower, into Épernay ( 38 photos )
Saturday was our last day in Paris, and unfortunately it was overcast once again. We had breakfast at the hostel and then checked out, leaving our bags in the storage room.
From our hostel, we walked down to the Seine and along the river bank for quite a while. It was really pretty with all the colourful autumn leaves being reflected in the river.
We had been planning to go to the Eiffel Tower one afternoon so that we could see the sun setting over Paris, but the weather had been so awful that we missed our chance. But, we decided that we at least wanted to see the Eiffel Tower up close once more, so we kept walking all the way along the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. It was actually quite a long walk, and as we walked along the clouds parted and the sun came out! We decided if the sun was out then we would go up the tower and see Paris from the grandest viewpoint.
It took us a while longer to walk all the way to the Eiffel Tower and the clouds kept covering the sun and then parting. The last part of our walk took us through part of the park that the tower sits in, and the autumn leaf colours in the sunlight were beautiful.
At the tower, we had to join a large queue to get tickets, but it moved along quicker than we had expected it to. Once we had our tickets to go up the tower, we joined another queue for the lift. It was a double-level lift and it was quite large, which meant that lots of people fitted into it in one go.
The lift took us to the first level, and then the second level where we had to change lifts, so we had a bit of a look around. Already we seemed very high up and the views were pretty spectacular. We took a few photos and then joined the next queue for the lift to take us to the very top.
This queue seemed to take the longest, but the ride up in the lift and the views from the very top were well worth it all.
We could see a long way into the distance. We picked out the Arc d'Triomphe, the (now very tiny looking) hill with Sacre Coeur on top, and tried to pick out various other places that we had wandered through in Paris. The views of the Seine river stretching away to our left and right were also very pretty.
We stayed up the top for quite a while, walking around and doing our best to ignore the cold wind before queueing twice more to catch the lifts all the way back to the ground. It had been great to go up the Eiffel Tower, even if we didn't get to see a sunset, and it was a nice way to finish off our last day in Paris.
We caught a train from a station nearby back to the Notre Dame area. Once we got there we spent a while finding a pub to watch the World Cup Rugby, only to find out we had missed the game due to the time differences!
Instead we walked to the small park that is behind Notre Dame and sat and ate some food.
Before we left Paris, we decided to go back to the internet place we had bene to earlier in the week and quickly do a few more things. Everything was going well - we finished up, packed up the laptop, paid the guy (a different man to the other day we had been there) and were about to walk out when he asked for another ten euro for plugging the laptop in. He spoke very little English and we had already paid the fee for using the connection, so we were quite confused at first. Then we figured out what he was on about and we told him "No" and that we hadn't had to pay that much the other day when we had come here, and that nowhere on the price list did it say anything about a ten euro fee. But he kept babbling to us in French and saying we had to pay ten euro. So we walked out! We think that he knew we were tourists, so he was just trying to dupe us out of some more money.
Anyway, after all that excitement, we quickly walked back to our hostel to pick up our bags. Along the way we stopped for a kebab as we hadn't eaten much all day and were hungry. The kebab guy was so friendly, and as we were about to leave he gave us some of his home-made mint tea free of charge. So within about thirty minutes, we experienced a not-so-nice Parisian and a lovely friendly Parisian!
We got our bags from the hostel and used our last Metro tickets to get us to the train station we were going to be leaving Paris from.

Our train left about ten minutes after we got on it, and took just over an hour to get us to Épernay in the Champagne region. Our hotel was about ten minutes walk from the train station, but we had no map so it was a bit of guesswork finding the place. It turned out to be a really lovely little hotel, and our double room had a shower which was a nice treat after hostels.
We lazed around for a bit and went out to a town pub for a few beers. For dinner we just bought some yoghurt and biscuits as we weren't feeling too hungry after our kebab.
It started raining outside - not the best looking weather for the coming day.

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