My Return to France

Hello family and friends! I have started my next adventure post-grad in the beautiful country of France. I am going to be starting as an English teacher assistant at the beginning of October. I arrived in Paris on Wednesday, September 16th, and I'm staying with some family friends of ours for a week before I take the train out to La Rochelle. Unfortunately everyone I'm staying with was working when I came so we had to stop at the Embassy to get a key from them and then drag my two large suitcases up to the second floor (what we would consider the third floor). I started off trying to place one suitcase on a step and then the next one on the next step, but that was going to take way too long so I just turned around and walked backwards up the stairs pulling my suitcases up with me. Needless to say my arms hurt after that. I took a nap after I got to the apartment because I was so tired; I had left on Tuesday at 3:50pm and flew to Dublin, arrived in Dublin at 5am and left for Paris and got to Paris at 9:30am. That night we went to the American Ambassador's residence to watch the movie Man from UNCLE. It was an interesting, action packed movie. Her home is beautiful; I only saw a few rooms and a little bit of the backyard from the windows. It was amazing just being there for a few hours, and I got to meet the Ambassador because she was walking around talking to everyone.

On Thursday, September 17, I slept in because I still felt some jet-lag. Then I went out and bought a cell phone, a very simple pay-as-you-go phone. Then I took the métro to the train station Montparnasse to print off my train ticket. It took me a while to figure out where the machine was to print off my ticket. I almost stood in the long line for the information desk, but I'm glad I didn't because that would have taken longer, I'm sure. Then I walked around les Jardins de Trocadéro.

Views from Trocadéro

More views walking around

No matter how many times I see it, the Eiffel Tower always seems to take my breath away. You can't go to Paris without seeing it at least once :) Of course I saw it while I was in the taxi on the way to the apartment, on the métro ride to Montparnasse, and when I stopped here. It's nearly impossible to avoid; not that I would want to avoid it. The rest of the afternoon/evening I hung out at the apartment and waited for everyone to come home. 

Today, Friday, September 18, I slept in again because I'm on vacation right now and I don't have much to worry about nor do I have a lot of plans. I've already done most of the tourist things during my many previous visits to Paris so I'm not hurrying to see everything. I did go out today to Musée Marmottan Monet which is a beautiful little museum in an old house. It has a huge collection of Monet's paintings and there is the large private collection of the couple who previously owned the house. It was a pretty nice day out so I walked to the museum (plus there isn't a metro stop that would take me there; apparently the metro stop that you would take to get to the museum is the one closest to the apartment lol). After spending almost 2 hours in the museum, I sat in the park outside the museum and then came back to the apartment before it started to rain. I've just been hanging out in the apartment looking at possible places to rent in La Rochelle and being lazy. Of course it has stopped raining but it's already 6:20pm, and I don't want to go out right before everyone gets home. 

Unfortunately you can't take pictures inside Musée Marmottan, but here is the sign outside of the museum

I'm not sure what the park was called, but it's pretty nice. 

Some of the trees are changing colors already!

That's it for now. I'll try and do a lot more exploring of Paris before I head out, but I know I'll be back so I'm not too worried if I don't see everything that I want to.