48 hours in Paris

Remember my post about 24 hours in Paris? This time it's 48 hours. But I don't think there'll be a "72 hours" post... :P

I went to Paris on the 29th of June...the Sunday after my exams. Reached the gare de Lyon (Lyon train station, it's in Paris though ;) ) at about 1pm, then met up with Jiqiong for lunch. After eating, (and taking our time too! :P) I went to Mai's place in Cergy...unfortunately there aren't that many buses from the RER station there to her place on Sunday, and I missed the 4pm bus by only 5 minutes, and I had to wait more than an hour for the next bus :/

The next day Mai had an exam, so I went to the embassy with some others who had to go and get their passports (they had to renew it). I had never been there before, and I think I would never have gone there by myself... (I had already renewed my passport in Malaysia) So this gave me (and maybe you as well :P) a chance to see what the embassy was like.

2 bis, rue de Bénouville

Upon going in, we found ourselves in not-very-big but spacious room

The counter, with Firdaus waiting for his passport

doors to other offices
(here you see steps going up, but on the left there were steps going down, and that was the way to the JPA office)

a shelf (and table) with lots of (not very up to date) Malaysian magazines and newspapers

The metro station was Porte Dauphine, at the end the line 2. There were a whole lot of embassies there...not that we went into any other one, though.

We went downstairs and met En. Yusri. It was past 12 o'clock at that time, and at about 1pm we said we'd like to leave (and that we were getting hungry) Then En. Yusri suggested a Japanese restaurant nearby, his treat. Needless to say, we accepted...

All of us ordered the same thing...brochettes de gamba, saumon, thon et noix de Saint-Jacques (seafood satay, to put it simply) After the usual appetizer (Japanese salad and miso soup, which you can see in my other post about a visit to Toya) the prawns arrived first:

The lemon sachet is a wet tissue to clean your fingers after eating the prawns

Then the brochettes came with the rice.

What, only two?

Oh gosh, a third one suddenly popped up!

And a fourth!
So they gave us only two because those two could reproduce?

Okay la, just kidding. After giving us the plate of two brochettes, they came back twice with the other types of brochettes. The first two were salmon, then tuna and scallops. I don't understand why they didn't bring it all at once, though...it would have been logical if we had to wait some time for the other two, but I only had the time to snap one photo each time before the next one arrived (as you can see I hadn't started eating yet) So it didn't really make much sense...they really could just have waited a bit before bringing us the food.

You know, it was a (purely) Japanese restaurant (by purely I mean only Japanese food) but I heard the waiters talking to each other in Mandarin...so how authentic was it? :P

After eating we went walking about in Paris; there were sales going on, and what's more it was the holidays, so there were really a lot of people all over the place. And it was really hot as well, so we had ice-creams. Here's mine!

There were three flavours, one inside, and the two others as "petals". I was so afraid of the petals falling off...especially since the syrup from the fruit ice-cream was already dripping...

The shop was called Amorino (Italian ice-cream). It was really good (Firdaus the Parisian recommended it ;P) but unfortunately there isn't one in Lyon. The waitress there helped us take a photo with Firdaus' camera:

with Firdaus, Ili and Hidayah

In fact, at first we were going to look for Maoz Falafel in Paris (Hidayah and I tried it in Amsterdam, remember?) We called the number on the paper and the person who answered told us that it was at St Michel (the metro station, I mean). We planned to go there for lunch, but then our plans changed when En. Yusri wanted to belanja* us :P

*belanja = treat

The ice-cream shop was near St Michel, so as we walked out we were saying that we should go looking for Maoz Falafel, just to see what it was like, since we had already eaten. And guess what, upon stepping out, Maoz Falafel was just opposite us. Haha, talk about coincidence. Luckily we noticed it before going to look for it everywhere else but there :P

The next day (Tuesday, 1st of July) I took my flight back. From Cergy, there's a bus going straight to the airport, and the good thing is that it's not even a special bus, we can use normal public transport tickets on it! (It took about 1 hour and 15 minutes) In Lyon a student ticket to get to the airport costs 6€50, and I believe a normal ticket costs about 8€ or 9€.

The Paris-KL flight was pretty empty...just look at this photo I took at 12pm:


The plane was supposed to take off at twelve, but then there was an announcement saying that about 20 passengers were still passing through security, and that we'd have to wait a bit. But even after we took off, the seats around me (I was sitting near the back) were only about half filled up. Not that I was complaining, though, I had the two window seats to myself, making it easy to move in and out, and there was less wait for the toilet :P

At KLIA, I had to take my connecting flight to Kuantan. I arrived at 6.40am and after getting my boarding pass, it was a little past seven. (I didn't have to get my luggage because it was checked in all the way to Kuantan) The boarding gate was B9, and I decided to go there right away, seeing as I had nothing else to do anyway. But when I reached B9, the screen said that the gate had been changed to B10. Along the way I also saw that several other flights had changed gates. So I waited at B10, and half an hour before the flight, they changed the gate again, to A2 this time. That was at the other end of the terminal! There were really a whole lot of gate changes that morning, lots of announcements about that...I wonder what was going on.

So now I'm back home in Kuantan till mid-September. I don't have any plans yet though...for starters, it shall be eat-sleep :D