The City of Love

<3Paris: The City of Love <3
March 5th to 7th with Jen and Katie in Paris

Notes on Paris:

• Crêpes with Nutella are God's gift to Earth
• When you skip to the Eiffel Tower, tired is an understatement
• Bus Tours and audio guides are awesome
• When your with Jen, you'll meet someone you know
• The Eiffel tower glitters!
• When all else fails, use hand gestures
• Use the bathroom before you go through security at the airport, and be prepared to get felt up
• Paris is as full of sex images as everyone says
  

So we arrived on Thursday night, later than expected, after probably the worse flight ever. We flew easyjet (yes it's an actually airline, not just a website) and there were about 30 smelly French pre-teens on the plane with us who proceeded to yell and talk at super volume the entire time. When we finally arrived at the hostel, it was closed, with a note on the outside and a map of a hotel that we had to go to to pick up our key. When we got there, the man pretended not to understand English or know what the hell we were talking about. When we all looked like we were about to cry, he started laughing and handed over our key. There was apparently an overbooking or mistake, so we got a room for 5 to ourselves, with a bathroom.


On Friday for breakfast, they gave us each half of a bagette, nutella, butter, and jam. It was probably one of my favorite breakfasts ever. They also gave us coffee, which I was extremely thankful for. We started off our day at Notre Dame, which was extremely beautiful of course.

Then we grabbed the tour bus. We passed a lot of beautiful things, but we got off the bus at all the major things. We got off at the Arc de Triumph because we were pretty much numb. We grabbed some coffee to defrost, and then headed back to the bus. We stayed on it until the Eiffel Tower, which of course is when we got off to take the million and one retarded pictures in front of it. That was a lot of fun, other than me being really stressed about my housing situation.

After all that, we went back to the hostel so that I could charge my camera (it died) and eat lunch. Apparently Spain is the only place in Europe that eats so late, so we ended up missing lunch pretty much everywhere. We ended up eating a chinese resaurant, but it was really good food. Then we went to find an internet cafe before we went to the Louvre.

Crepes with Nutella.. hole in the wall outside the Internet Cafe


Trying to Survive the Cold by wrapping up in our scarves


The Louvre.. Love at First Sight

The Louvre is apparently free on Friday nights to youths under 26, so we instead spent our money on an audioguide, which was really high tech and by far, the best audio guide I've ever used. It showed you pictures of the artwork while it talked, and images of the corners you had to turn to get to different places. We took the Master's tour, which showed us the 3 most famous works of the museum: The Mona Lisa, The Venus de Milo, and the Victory of Samothrace. The tour is supposed to take an hour and a half, but of course took us longer because we kept getting lost. Afterwards, we just wandered, and when we came upon a painting with an audioguide number, we'd sit and listen to it. We were in the museum from 6pm-10pm and pretty much dilusional by the time we got out of there, since we'd been moving since 9am, and we still weren't done yet.

Once we were exhausted, we started imitating statues.

The Eiffel Tower glitters every hour for 10 minutes. We caught the end of it around 10, but decided we needed to get a closer look. We therefore thought it'd be a good idea to walk there. We made it about 5 minutes before the 11pm showing with some serious skipping involved. However, it was probably the most magical thing I've ever seen. However, it made me want to be kissing a boy.

If only this picture could really capture the beauty of it

Saturday, we didn't really do anything specific. We went sovenier shopping and wandering. We went into a lot of stores, drank coffee, ate cheese crepes, sent postcards, and then went back to the airport for the end of another great trip.

Saturday Calf Stretching