Personal : My First Trip To Paris

My first trip to Paris wasn’t until I was twenty. I was studying abroad in Florence and my friends and I decided to take a weekend trip to the City of Lights. I had come down with terrible bronchitis that week and it was Valentine’s Day Weekend. Part of the trip I remember and parts I can’t. I am going to blame it on the fever and being sick. My Mom begged me not to go but I didn’t want to pass up my first trip to Paris. Can you blame me?

We took the overnight train to Paris from Florence.  My friends picked the hotel so I can’t remember which arrondissement we first stayed in. There are so many things I would have done differently but I was in College and this was my first time abroad. We ate at Hard Rock Café and had huge burgers and visited the McDonald’s in Galleries Lafayette. I am pretty sure we ate Chinese food one night and I decided I didn’t like French food after seeing someone order snails at a nearby café. I did squeeze in a crêpe which I happily ate on the top of a double decker bus driving around the city in the middle of February. Probably not the best idea for someone who had bronchitis. I didn’t even have a cup of coffee because I hadn’t started drinking coffee until much later after this trip.

While in High School, my French teacher taught us about the French Impressionist artists so a visit to the Museé D’Orsay was high on my list. The museum didn’t disappoint and is still one of my favorite places to visit in Paris. In 2003, before I left to study abroad my Mom bought my first digital camera. If I remember correctly it was a canon and was about 3.2 megapixels. I have it in a box somewhere in storage. I brought both my film camera and my digital camera this trip and I had no idea how a trip to the Museé D’Orsay would change my life. More about that a little later…

We visited the Champs élysées and shopped for hours and a quick trip to Galleries Lafayette for more shopping… We did make it to the Louvre where we passed by the Mona Lisa and decided finding Angelina was way more important. This was way before google maps or smart phones we walked in circles and never actually found it before having to go home. This trip was the complete opposite of my life now. Completely touristy and basically everything I advise against when traveling to Paris. 

I spent three more months traveling around Italy and Europe after this first trip to Paris. I hadn’t decided to move to Paris until years later. In 2003, when I studied abroad being a travel photographer or blogger wasn’t something that was talked about or even something I thought was possible. I walked away from my experience abroad with a love for Europe and Travel and a dream that I could travel the world and find a way to get paid for it. I had no idea that this would become a reality a few years later…