"I see London, I see France..."

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2284671&id=11832732&l=86f040cb2a
Photos 1-7

Today (Saturday the 28th of March), I left Swansea with my Dad on the beginning of a 10 day excursion to explore Europe (since I am here now, I might as well see some of it). We started off by taking a train from Swansea to London, and then catching a train from Swansea to Paris.

No, you did not misread that - a train from London to Paris, France (hence the title of today's post). It was pretty cool, since we got to pass through the Chunnel (the tunnel under the English channel). The train was very fast; my Dad and I estimated it to be traveling at normally ~140 mph (we assumed the cars we saw were going 70-80 mph on the highway, and we were at least going twice as fast), although we possibly slowed down under the channel - I couldn't tell since we were in a dark tunnel for a very long time and couldn't see anything out the window (couldn't even see the walls of the tunnel, which shows how dark it was).

So we got to Paris, where we realized that Paris is in a different timezone than the UK (another hour ahead). We were glad to learn this, because this evening was daylight savings time (although it is called Summer Time here), so we knew we needed to skip 2 hours ahead rather than 1.

After arriving in Paris, my Dad took me to a store and bought me a chocolate crepe. For those of you unfamiliar with crepes, they are sort of like extra thin pancakes typically containing some sort of flavoring. I greatly enjoyed mine (the exact name of the stuffing was Nutella, which is technically different than chocolate, but tasted great to me).

After the crepes, we went to the Paris subway (very different from the British one in the fact that some cars have rubber wheels and ride on a road-like surface, whle others are two-story cars) and arrived at our hotel. I must admit I was feeling nervous, since I was in a completely foreign country where I did not know the native language, and would have to rely on others being able to speak English to understand me (turned out not to be a big problem, but it was a worrysome factor for me on my first day/evening).