Schengen sorting

Well, after a long spell in which we didn't do anything, we're finally back on the ball. We decided to go ahead and book a trip somewhere in Europe so that we could get our 90 day Schengen visas. This will allow us to go on random trips around Europe as long as we have time and money.

So anyway, we decided to go to Paris because it's romantic, close to England, and we haven't been there before. :P Finding accommodation was a major schlep! We didn't want to spend much money on accommodation and as we can only really afford a few days, we didn't want to have a long commute to the outskirts of the city each day. So that means dodgy lodging in the center. We found a few nice looking places on the internet but most of them got terrible online reviews from other travelers. It was really scary stuff! For others, our friend Zulaigha had reservations, and so we nixed them too. With all the horror stories we were getting from review sites and with all the time we were wasting looking for places to stay we eventually got fed up (we're that kind of tourist :P ) and decided to go for a chain of hotels. My argument was that they'd have standards at least. Probably very low standards, but standards all the same! Anyway, we booked three nights at the 2* Ibis Hotel near Gare du Nord so hopefully we'll spend very little time commuting. And then Sameer booked our flights on Easy Jet. We're leaving for Paris early on the morning of Friday the 18th January, and arriving back at Luton airport the same time the next Monday morning. I wanted to get an afternoon flight back but Sameer is keen to get to Cambridge at roughly the same time that the rest of his class does.

And then today we called the French embassy's visa hotline (so funny!) and booked an appointment for January 7th. We'll sort the Schengen visas out then. Apparently it only takes 24 hours to do! So yay. :)