Travel Log
Posts Tagged ‘Paris’
And now it is time for the City of Light. I will be travelling from Lyon to Paris on the TGV high-speed train. I got my booking done early for a change.
Glorious Paris
Paris, wow…
I have to admit that Paris is one of the few cities so far that not only lives up to its reputation but also exceeds it by a large margin. Paris is an incredible city with something new and wonderful around every corner. I was in Paris for eight days and it wasn’t nearly enough. There is so much to see there that I could have spent my entire 90 days in Paris and still not see everything.
Paris Highlights
I did so much while in Paris that I’m sure that I’ve already forgotten many of the details. I’m still running about two weeks behind on updating my Blog but I’m doing the best I can. I’m currently in Berlin so I’ve been to Bruges, Brussels, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam since I was in Paris. I don’t think I’ll ever get caught up completely.
Palace Excursions
While I was staying in Paris I took day trips to the palaces at Fontainebleu and Versailles. I was glad that I went to Fontainebleu first since it is the older of the two palaces. It was kind of a cloudy Sunday afternoon when I went to Fontainebleu but I was lucky and only had a few brief drizzles until I was safely on the train back to Paris. At that point I kind of enjoyed watching the rain come down outside the train window.
Well I had hoped that I could avoid it but it finally happened. My last day in Paris I got my camera stolen. At least I think it got stolen (either that or I left it someplace during my last day’s travels). Whatever the case when I was packing up getting ready to leave Paris for Bruges Belgium it was nowhere to be found. Bummer !!!
There is a bright side to this story. The day before the camera disappeared I copied Stef and Jason’s pictures to my computer so I could burn a CD for them. They didn’t have computers with them and they had both filled up the memory in their cameras. Anyway, after I did their pictures I downloaded all of my Paris pictures to my computer. As a result, I only lost a few pictures (the ones I took on my last day in Paris) but the majority of my pictures where safely stored on my computer. The loss of the camera was a bummer but I would have been much more upset if I had lost my pictures.
So… the first task when I arrived in Bruges Belgium was to go shopping for a new camera. I was lucky because one of the guys working the desk at the Bruges hostel was a camera buff and had several suggestions for where to shop for a new camera. The best deal I found was at a store that I would swear is the European version of Walmart. I’m actually pretty happy with the replacement. Its another Sony but it has a Zeis lens (about as good as you can get) that has a much wider field of view (I can get more into the picture) and it is much more sensitive (ISO 1000 rather than ISO 400) so it works better in low light (many museums and churches will let you take pictures only with no flash). I went for a 512mb memory card too which is twice the space I had in the old camera. So all in all I had to shell out €250 that I hadn’t planned on but I guess it was bound to happen soon or later. I’ve started being more diligent with keeping things locked up. Hopefully it won’t happen again.
