Day 18

Today was another very eventful day to say the least. We started out by going to Pompidou and then made our way to Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle. From there, we went up to the Opera and Galleries Lafayette which is a HUGE 7 story place to shop and is beautiful. We liked looking at all of the clothes...just looking at most because it was like 300 euro for a pair of jeans. I actually bought something there, which is hard to imagine. From there, we at the the Cafe Opera and then made our way down to the Siene River. We then bought tickets to go on the boat tour, but did not want to go on it yet because we wanted to go when all of the lights were on. We decided to go to a couple cafe's to waste time, so we did, and I had fabulous Creme Brulee! It was amazing. Then we went and sat on our boat until it left. About 5 minutes before we took off, the lights of the Eiffel Tower came on and then started sparkling..it was awesome! The boat tour was about an hour long (from 10-11), and we saw soo many things. It was really really cool. Then during the last loop, which took us past the entire Eiffel Tower, it had just gotten completey dark and it started sparkling again. We lucked out!! Then, we thought it was a 20-30 minute walk back to the train station....well that turned into 50 min of walking as fast as we could. We thought that the last train that left for our stop was at 12:13 am.....we were wrong!! So there were no more trains going to our stop from Chatlet (where we were). We had no idea what to do. We were going to stay there and figure something out (or wait until 5 am when the busses started again) but instead we decided to take the train to Saint George's, the closest stop the train went to where we needed to go. On the way there on the train, you could not believe what was going through our minds. We hoped maybe we could get a cab there...which would cost like 100 euro, or maybe a bus?? If not we were going to get a hotel or stay there for 5 hours, ride back to our hotel at 5:30, pack up all of our stuff, and then head back towards the airport to catch our plane. When we finally got off at St. Georges, we were o so lucky to find that there were 2 more trains going our way; we were more than happy....words cannot even explain how happy we were! So tomorrow we head back to Leiden. It will be nice to hear people speak English again. :)