anywho. it's time to talk about my trip to PARIS. paris is a place that people literally dream of going to for their whole entire lives, and i am fortunate enough to have gone at age 20, more or less on my parents dime, with the company of my friends. how did i get so lucky? i began my trek to france in the middle of the night, leaving my apartment at 345am. after bussing it and making it through ryanair's nazi baggage rules, i was taking off at around 7 and landed in france a couple hours later. of course, we flew into the airport that was 2 hours outside of paris, forcing us to pay 15 euro for a bus where i sat next to a man that might as well have been a pack of cigarettes. after a total of seven hours of travel, we had arrived in the city. i am super proud of us for figuring out how to use a metro system in a city where none of us spoke the language. #runninshit. and as soon as we dropped our stuff at the hostel we nommed on some quiche and headed off to the louvre.
okay so this place was actually unreal. obviously i heard it was big but i wasn't expecting a damn palace! there is no way a human could conquer this place in one day. i was there for almost 4 hours and i was more or less only on one floor. i've learned that i'm a huge nerd when it comes to art. my class in the prado has become one of my favorites because i think it's insane that i get to look at real, original, paintings by such influential artists. annnnd i'm turning into my mother. the louvre is home to so many famous pieces of art, not just the mona lisa. 35,000 pieces of art to be exact. i think it was the perfect place to start our french adventure. molly met us after we were done and walked us down the champs elysees, home to some of france's best shopping too bad i'm poor but we didn't have time to stop. at the end of this famous street is the arch de triomphe, where we got to see some kind of special military ceremony, because that weekend was their version of veterans day. *fun fact about the arch de triomphe: the flame that is always burning under it represents an ambiguous "fallen soldier" of various wars and one of the only times it was been put out is when a mexican guy peed on it and got banned from the country of france forever.* thursday night was uneventful and we passed out after drinking wine in our hostel's bar.
friday morning we woke up ready to take a 3.5 hour walking tour. only in paris would i be excited about this. especially when it was FREEZING. thank god patty agreed to bring my coat to madrid this weekend. lord knows i'll need it in brussels and amsterdam. digressing...our tour guide was phenom and he was actually from amsterdam, making him automatically cooler than everyone ever. we saw the entire city and he had crazy stories about the history of every monument. i honestly learned more on friday than i did in a whole semester of history class. after the tour was over we ate an authentic french meal and then headed to the notre dame. the architecture of this place was even better than in the disney movie. inside was so different than the other cathedrals i've seen thus far simply because it is so old. in 2013 it will be the notre dame's 850th anniversary. that's like, more than twice as long as america has even been a country. friday night we went to the USA vs France soccer game and had legit seats for only 10 euro. i guess no frenchies wanna sit in the american section. even though we almost got lost on the journey there and didn't have any time to pregame, i had a great time. just being in that atmosphere and being able to be patriotic for the first time in a long time cured a little bit of america-sickness. france won though, and we were all sore losers, so we drowned our sorrows in french onion soup after the game. here is where we met our future husbands. BUT that story is gonna have to wait. this post is getting too long and my hot water is gonna get turned off in an hour. for the next two days. wtf.
more on paris later bye.
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