Salut mon Blog! Oh, sorry, Hey Blog! You might have noticed from the language, but WE’VE BEEN TO FRANCE!
This was the first time I have been out of the British Isles since 2017, when we popped back to Barbados to see how it was getting along after we had left it in 2015. So it was kind of a big deal. As we want to lower carbon emissions as much as possible, nous ne prenons pas l’avion, mais le Eurostar (or ‘we didn’t take the plane but the Eurostar’ in English). The main reason for going to Paris was to visit two prehistoric art exhibitions, both at le Musée de l’homme and that for a short period overlapped. I am doing an Arts Award, an award for young people interested in the Arts, on the subject of Prehistoric Art, and the level I’m doing (Silver) is equivalent standard to a GCSE in Arts. For the award you need to visit an exhibition/show, and as there are two on the topic of prehistoric art there, it made for a nice excuse to go to France and have fun! I hope to tell you about these in another post.
This is also the first time I have been to France, or indeed any country in Europe outside the UK, since I was about 1 and we went to Sicily. I don’t remember this of course, and as I wasn’t speaking at the time, I’ve never had to use another language before, as all the countries I’ve been to have been English-speaking. English is spoken a lot more in France than I thought it would be, but my conversation is still not up to the standard I would feel comfortable going to another county on my own with! Luckily, I’m learning French on Duo Lingo and have done a bit with Mum, so I was able to understand a few bits of conversation and order myself a caramel crepe at a creperie completely on my own. I’m glad Mum was there though; as she used to teach French before I was born, she could check into the hotel and ask all sorts of questions where me and Dad would have been utterly lost!
The Eurostar leaves from London St. Pancras International. It’s not the most interesting experience going through the actual channel, as there’s nothing to see! It’s dark out there, as is expected when you are underneath the sea floor, and from start to finish it’s 50 kilometres, starting in Kent and finishing on the north coast of France, or the other way round if going the other way! The Channel Tunnel is the third longest railway tunnel in the world, and has the longest undersea section. We were traveling at 270-something mph for a lot of the journey, which meant it didn’t take long. The longest part was traveling to Paris after arriving in France, though the entire journey seemed to take a lot less time on the way back for some reason! The train’s destination in France was the Gare du Nord, meaning train station of the north, from which it was only a twenty-minute walk to the hotel.
When we arrived in France, my first impressions of Paris were that it was big, it was busy, it was fancy – pretty much as I’d expected, really. It also had a different smell to England; Paris smells of warmth and a bit sweet (maybe that’s all the pastries). It’s a normal western city, and it is more like London that I’d expected. I also heard more different languages bring spoken in Paris than I had heard in London earlier the same day. Paris is a gateway to lots of places: eastern, western, northern and southern Europe, not to mention the British Isles, and so has developed a fusion of many different cultures. I also heard my first swifts of the year; this signals a return from spring to summer and further brightened up the evening.