Paris

It's a shame to be leaving Paris so soon, I feel like we still just arrived in France yet somehow ten days have flown by. Nonetheless, I'm very excited to be on an underground train to London as I'm writing this: after hearing so much about a place which is one of the greatest cities in the world, it's hard to not feel such a sense of anticipation.

That being said, it'll be near impossible for London to surpass Paris in my mind. By far my favourite place we've been to so far, the 'city of love' has such an incredible atmosphere about it. I can't help thinking of Paris as a better version of Rome: the streets feel uncrowded and spacious, the Moroccans, as amusing as they were, are far less common, and the architecture is an improvement of Roman ideas. The greatest highlights of Paris for me were the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Arch-de-Triomphe and the Champs-Elysees. Most impressive was the artwork inside the Louvre, of which we apparently only managed to see around a fifth of, but all of which was mind-blowing, to say the least. How sculptors managed to make marble look like flesh is a mystery to me, and I can't count the number of times I was made speechless by the sight of a painting that looked like a photograph. Alongside this, in the square outside Notre-Dame, I was blown away on three nights by the same incredible buskers, who did such tricks with fire that I cannot expect to describe and do justice to.

Although it's a shame to be leaving all this behind, we've just come up on the other side of the tunnel and I'm now looking out over the English countryside, ready to make the most of the last week of the tour.

— Joel Bateman