Travel Log: France

By A.P.

My trip to France was mostly in a small town called Nancy. It is in the Lorraine region and about 400 km east of Paris. Nancy has a population of about

300 000. To compare, Toronto has about 2.5 million!

Guess what this is! It’s a street toilet! You just pop in a 20euro cent coin, and the door will open

for you! Pretty handy, eh? I don’t think it’s used too often, though...

Our main transport was the tram of course, other than the bus or walking. But, some people used these ‘rental bikes’ which you could get around the city on racks.

Place Stanislas is a gigantic rectangle in the middle of the city, surrounded by ornate classical building, and gilded wrought iron gates. It was built by Stanislas Leszczynski, the duke of Lorrain. Former king of Poland, he set out to make Nancy a beautiful new town. The first time my family and I walked down, it was at night, and everything was lit. Place Stanislas is simply the perfect example of an art nouveauart nouveau structure.

This museum displays various items, such as furniture, deco, glassware, and stained-glass in the style of Art Nouveau. Many of the rooms were themed by the artist. My favourite was the lavender bedroom, because it had such an interesting bed, with a mayfly on the footboard to represent life and death, and a sphinx on the headboard to symbolize dawn.

Near the end of our stay in France, we made a day trip to Paris. We took the TGV there and back-in case you don’t know, the TGV is almost fastest train in the world-! Unfortunately, we forgot that clocks went back an hour, so we ended

up at the station at 5:30 instead of 6:30.

And... the Eiffel tower! From Gare de L’est (or the east train station), we got some metro tickets, and headed toward the tower. Surprisingly, the line wasn’t as long as I’d expected it to be. We stopped

only at the second platform because the third one was closed. We took pictures of

the view outside, then since it was so cold we went inside to look at the boutique. There were lots of touristy things, like mini Eiffel towers on key chains, or just models. I found a really cute pack of Eiffel tower pasta! We bought two post cards for us to write and mail from the

Eiffel tower, there is a special postal cancellation, that has a picture of the tower on it.

As I was walking around the second platform, I noticed that the ticket booth for the third platform was open, so my family and I quickly lined up (so many lines!) to get a ticket and go up. The distance between the second and third platform is enormous, and the view is not so great for taking pictures, but looking

out feels really scary,at least for people scared of heights!

After coming down from the Eiffel tower, we went down to the little stand and got crepes. As we were eating, my mum got a pass for the ‘Bato Bus’ which is actually a boat on the river Seine, that stops at majorplaces, such as the Louvre, Notre Dame,and of course, the Eiffel tower.