Got up bright and early and headed to St. Pancreas dragging our bags behind us.... ah yes, this travelling thing is so exciting. The hotel was a great location though, right across from the train station and that was the biggest reason we booked it. Our room was better than Mary's who seemed to get a disabled room with a lightbulb or two not working (probably a good thing) under the circumstances! Once inside the enormous structure of the railway station, we luckily found a nice table outside one of the breakfast places and sat with our luggage and some breaky and 'people watched' - it was great fun. We were in plenty of time for our train, so that part was very relaxing. The train station was busy though, but we managed to find our platform ok and got things settled with our tickets and through security (which was easier than the airline process). The train journey was good, rushing through the French countryside at 183 mph.... quite an experience. When we arrived in Paris it was a nightmare trying to get a cab, there was at least 200 people in line for taxis with an expected wait of 45 minutes to an hour. So, after much debate we ended up taking a private car for an exhorbident amount of euros and got safely and quickly to our hotel. This hotel, the West End is lovely! Our rooms (although I'm sure not the best in the house) are small (thank goodness we didn't bring the cat), but they are quite luxurious with crisp bedlinen and nice towels. We were given a warm welcome, and after dropping the cases in the rooms headed down to the hotel lounge for some refreshment (after all we were missing our high tea in the Club Room at Royal Le Meridien in Dubai) and then headed out to explore a little of Paris.
Well, here we are out and about in the afternoon and managed to secure tickets to the Crazy Horse Paris showroom for tonight's performance at 7:30pm. Walking along our hotel's neighbourhood we found this awesome little restaurant and had the most delicious French Onion Soup with plenty of french bread and good butter, yummy! The best thing about this restaurant though was the owner - she greeted us like old friends and definitely had the customer service thing down pat (perhaps she'd trained in Dubai we mused). Because it was the late afternoon (5ish) the restaurant wasn't too busy and we just about had the place to ourselves! The evening show (which we could just walk to - even in my high heels) was fantastic, lots of Cirque de Soleil type performances and the drinks during the show was a nice touch (although Mary and I remarked that the chapagne wasn't quite up to the stuff we had during our afternoon high teach at Al Arab.... will everyting now be compared to our experiences in Dubai?) After the show, we strolled back to the hotel as it was just a short distance away and had a nightcap in our room before retiring for the night. We decided to do a City tour of Paris tomorrow on the red bus, so we'll see how that goes.
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