July 26

7/26 - Paris/Roscoff

Today began with another hostel breakfast, but today we did not steal anything for lunch.  After breakfast we packed up all of our things, noticing that our bags feel a whole lot heavier, and checked out.  We left our bags in storage so we could see Sacre Coeur and the Montmartre area.  When we arrived we walked through a whole bunch of stores where Maryanne finally

found the pants she'd been looking for, and where Karen got presents for Jackie and Jenna.  At the end of this street there was trouble... groups of men trying, very persistently, to braid bracelets on your arm and to also pick your pocket.  These guys were very persistent and Karen even had to save Maryanne form one of them.  After surviving that we rode the funicular up to the top of Sacre Coeur.  

View from the steps of Sacre Coeur

 

Inside the church it is lovely.  The church is giant and has so much to see.  After seeing the church we walked around the side and heard some amazing music.  We stopped to listen and ended up buying a CD.  The band was made up of excellent musicians.  Then we wandered around looking at paintings.  After this it was back down the hill and onto the metro, but not before stopping in a cool chocolate store that sold jars of caramel with little spoons, which we got.  There was also an Eiffel Tower made completely out of chocolate!  

 

After a metro ride back to the hostel we stopped at our favorite European lunch spot, then went grocery shopping before picking up our stuff from the hostel and getting on the metro again so we could get our train, so we can catch our Ferry on Friday.

An umbrella machine at the train station!

 We took the train to about 30 minutes outside of Roscoff, which is where we were to catch our ferry.  When we got off the train we knew we needed to get on a bus, but we didn't know where.  Luckily there was a nice French woman and a girl from Iowa to help us out, although the town was so small that the station was very easy to navigate.  We got on our bus with about 5 other people and hoped to be let off somewhere close to where we needed to be.  The driver didn't speak much English, so when we showed him the name of hotel it was hard to understand him, but his tone and reaction seemed reassuring... and rightly so, as our hotel was literally ten feet from where we were let off at the bus station.  The hotel was quaint and served us well, and its name was Hotel Regina, which allowed for some lovely song parodies by Karen.  We were in shock of the small, small town in contrast to the places we'd already been, but we were excited to explore it.

The view from our hotel in Roscoff.