Peachy Press: our trip to paris, france.

After our time in Taizé, we spent two days in Paris. Both Josh and I were pretty exhausted from camping, walking and just being in Taizé, but we managed to have fun in Paris. That's not really a difficult task, though. Paris is pretty large and has awesome architecture around every corner. Since we had our camping gear with us we decided to camp just outside of Paris at Camping Indigo . This saved us some money and made us feel like it was really worth it to lug all the camping gear.

We had no plan for Paris. We had some things in mind; Josh wanted to see Champs Élyseés and Notre Dame and I wanted to see the Eiffel Tour at night. Each day we packed a bag and set off on foot. For food we usually found a boulangerie where we bought baguettes and a grocery where we got cheese, tomatoes and peaches. Seeing Paris on the cheap was our goal and it worked out well.

Day one included: croissants and pan au chocolate for breakfast, walking along the Champs Élyseés (of course we sang the song), picnic lunch in a park, hanging outside and inside of Notre Dame, enjoying a bread festival, eating 23rd birthday cake, walking along the Seine River, picnic dinner in front of the Eiffel Tower (we saw it blink once), avoiding the PSG celebration/riot, and finally flopping into sleeping bag at the end of a nice, long day.

Day two included: More bread, more cheese, more walking. We had croissants for breakfast again. Yum! We walked towards Montmartre/Sacré Cœur thinking it's the super cool artsy area of Paris only to find that's is pretty touristy. Josh misunderstood some advice from Elliot about that area. Whoops. After eating a small lunch of bread and cheese, we decide to not eat any more bread for the rest of the trip. Promptly after that we found ourselves in a cozy cafe ordering a lunch combo of bread, nutella, cheese, cake and cocoa. I guess it's unavoidable in Paris. This cafe was one of the highlights of Paris for us. We really needed some time to rejuvenate; we ate, drank cocoa and coffee, read, I wrote in my journal and Josh wrote ideas for a take home exam. Our cafe was uncrowded with only a friend of the owner, two American tourists and a French woman with her grandson coming in during our 4 hour lunch break. We saw the Sacré Cœur, walked down the street with Moulin Rouge (pretty weird), stopped to watch some people play petanque and finally headed back to our campsite. Another good day. On day three we took down our tent, ate breakfast, took a bus to the airport and flew home.