What a marvellous time! What a fantastic city! After Asia, how European! How expensive!!
So good thing we heard about couch surfing. That's where you email strangers on the couch surfing website and ask to sleep on their couch for free. The first guy we asked was busy, but wonderful Laurent gave us his OWN BED to sleep in!!! He already had a couple of Americans on his couch, so he went to stay with his girlfriend and gave us the keys to his flat!!!
It was great having a local around. He told us about the best places, took us out for a drink at his local (incidentally, right beside Sacre Coeur in Montmartre!!!), took us out for the free couscous meal they have on Thursday nights by his place, showed us the best place for fresh baguettes, and gave us some delicious pate from his home town of Toulouse. We love him so much :) Especially when without his house we would have been paying at least NZ $100 per night for a scabby room with no shower, plus food...
Our first night in Paris at a cheap hotel cost as much as a whole week in Vietnam!
We crammed everyday full of everything Paris: the Eiffel Tower, Nutella, Arc de Triomphe, metro, la Defense (huge square arch and statues in a shopping centre), Les Halles, Moulin Rouge, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur, le Centre Pompidou, Versailles, Place de la Concorde, the Louvre, les Tuileries, Parc de la Villette, Champs Elysees....
Highlights were: the modern art at Pompidou, especially the design store and Philippe Starck's stuff (we got his lemon squeezer), the bottle of wine that cost half as much as the cork screw, drinking it in a sunny park, speaking French all day long, the gorgeous gardens at the Palace of Versailles, walking up to the very top of the Eiffel Tower and seeing the view, the environmental exhibit at Parc de la Villette (the world may yet be saved)...
Lowlights were: being so cheap and eating things like sausages and lentils in a tin, having to spend an hour at the laundromat every other day to clean our very limited supply of clothes, almost getting scammed 50 Euro near the Moulin Rouge, catching a plane that actually left a month after the one we wanted (long story - involved a bomb scare and many hours waiting at Charles de Gaulle airport)
I reckon we haven't seen the last of good old Paris :)
