You must be prepared before getting into France.
- Megabus is a bargain and easy method to go from the UK to France - (Jake Protip)
- Have some euros before you arrive in Paris - ATM's are few and hard to find!
- Know exactly how you are getting from the bus/train station to your accommodation.
- Get the free Paris Metro app.
- Get mapsme. offline maps for Paris.
- Arriving at a train station, get a 1 day metro pass only - we got pressured into the 5 day pass ($100AUD bugger it) which we may not use everyday because we'll walk or cycle most of the time to get amongst it. (statement may be untrue if wet for the duration of our stay)
The UK had us bluffed, we knew France would be challenging but we thought we'd be ok. Britain was easy to get around, everything is in english etc. we thought we would be OK to waltz into Paris and expect to follow suit but we were wrong - especially after not sleeping over night.
We'd been in contact with our AirBnb host days before hand and had teed it up to gain early access to our apartment in central Paris. When we finally got to the apartment, no one was there to meet us, we didn't have a working phone as at this stage we had not got a euro pre-paid sim card. Luckily we were close to Macca's FreeWifi and could quickly whatsapp the host to figure out what was going on...
Long story short, and the person who was supposed to let us in early had a night on the turps and was late to let us into our apartment. She wasn't fussed that she was late either, and according to our host she was supposed to checkout another apartment and hadn't. Thankfully we got a refund of 40euros to help the situation.
After a nap we hit the streets to get our bearings and see some sights which were walking distance from the apartment.
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| Cathedral Notre Dame - across the Seine from our apartment. |
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| Outside the Louvre |
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| Jardin des Tuileries - the garden in front of the Louvre |
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| Arc de Triomphe - Avenue des Champs-Élyséesar |
The day before in London - Saturday 18th June
Back to London for the day before we caught an overnight bus across to Paris. We arrived in London from Ipswich around 09:30, had a coffee then headed to Shacklewell to catch up with me old mate Dadsy. He was streaming the Cats/Bulldogs game which was awesome, I've been hankering to watch some footy.
We hit up Broadway Market after the footy for some tucker (had a ripper chilli crispy chicken wrap), had a look around then hit up a pub for a couple of pints, watched a game of soccer and talked some smack with Dadsy before we needed to get organised to head back to Victoria Station to catch our bus.
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| Some tucker before our overnight bus ride. |
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| The megabus |
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| P&O Ferry from Douvres UK to Calais France |
We'd booked the Megabus a couple of months ago, 20quid each for the trip which included the short ride across the english channel on a ferry. There was wifi on the bus which was a must. Our reliance on wifi is becoming stupid.
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