Paris

Things since Copenhagen have been pretty uneventful- I've finalized plans for moving to an apartment (I get a single, yay!), my schedule, and I have an interview with a hospital set up for this Friday. The weekend before last I just spent finishing off a final paper to turn in early, so the next weekend (this past weekend), I wouldn't have any work. Because...this past weekend we had yet another Friday off, so I headed off to Paris with Zoe, Lindsey, Steve and Margaret to meet up with some friends of Lindsey's!

We got into Paris on Thursday evening, and a little more than an hour later finally made it to our hostel. We stayed in St. Christoper's, a new hostel in the north of Paris, in the neighborhood where Amelie was filmed. If you ever go to Paris, stay here, because it was pretty much one of the nicest hostels I have stayed in. Good price too.

Anyways, there we met up with Lindsey's friend Alyssa, who is studying abroad in Copenhagen with the same program that Ariella is. We were all kind of tired from travel and planing on getting up early, so we found a restaurant around the corner from the hostel and ate there. It was good- one of those places with little grills on your table, so you cook the food yourself. You'd think the food would cost less, since you're the one doing the cooking, but you would be wrong. Still delicious.

Steve met up with us in the hostel, and we made plans for the next day. We woke up pretty early on Friday, and headed out to Montmartre to see Sacre Coeur, the giant palace-y looking basilica. On the way there I misread the map, and we ended up going the wrong direction for a couple blocks, and ended up in the Red Light Disctrict Pigalle. It was pretty much a 4 or 5 block strip of sex shops, strip clubs and bars that include the original Moulin Rouge. I should probably see that movie sometime, huh?

Once we figured out that we were going in the wrong direction, we got to Sacre Coeur quickly, and climbed up the big stairs at the bottom of the hill to the top. On the way up, Steve got tricked into buying a bracelet- some guy approached him and had him hold some strings that he wove into a bracelet and tied around his wrist before Steve could say anything. Some people aren't just mean enough to ignore people like that.... :D

The view from the top was pretty, but it was foggy out, so the Eiffel Tower in the distance was kind of dim. After that we went back to the metro station and navigated our way to Versailles, the palace built by Louis XIV, the sun king. Versailles was huge but we spent several hours there and saw almost everything. We started with the main palace, and toured through all of the rooms there that we were allowed.

The rooms were gorgeous- they had preserved all of the original room decorations and everything was either pretty french patterned cloth or gold leaf. I really liked this palace in general, compared to other ones I have been too, because it had a lot of windows. The back of Versailles into this gigantic garden, so a lot of the windows were open to the garden. My favorite part was the hall of mirrors... it was still beautiful, and so easy to imagine courtiers running around in there. This would have been where Anne Boleyn learned to be French when he parents sent her to France as punishment.

We also saw Marie Antoinette's old room, where she had to close her balcony doors because the public was starving and demanding bread outside of her balcony, and about to attack her. One thing sort of annoying about Versailles was that there were these Jeff Koons pieces put in the middle of those elegant rooms- they were trying to show some comparison between modern art and the art of Versailles, but it was not a good juxtaposition. I mean, you would have this beautiful ballroom, and then a giant pink balloon animal in the middle of the room, or a lobster hanging from the ceiling, or a bunch of vacuum cleaners standing in front of an original portrait of Marie Antoinette. Strange...

Afterward 4ish hours there we went out to the gardens, which you could spend hours and hours in. They were pretty already, so they must be amazing in the Spring. I would most definitely go back there. Out in the giant gardens there were a few other buildings that we walking around in, including another royal residence that was used mostly by the Bonaparte family, and Marie Antoinette's private retreat.

There were also sheep and cows all the way back there! There were a lot of swans too- one of the guys in a work truck who was doing landscaping was driving around, and this swan-goose (it was too ugly to be a swan, but not the right coloring to be a goose. It was swan size though) just went and sat right where he was trying to drive. He honked at it a few times, yelled out the window at it, and when it finally started moving, tried to run it over. Ah, french road rage. Anyways the place is so big that they also rent out golfcarts so you can ride those around. Lets just say I was really happy to sit for that half an hour train ride back around 5:30.

Once we were back into Paris proper, we went to the Louvre. The Louvre is open till 10 and free for people under 25 on Fridays, so we had about 4 hours there. I was actually able to walk through almost every exhibit (I really wanted to see the Islamic art exhibit, but it was closed ): ), but I can completely see how you could spend a week there. Especially if you can read French- the little paragraphs they usually have under paintings and stuff were only written in French, which I can read if I try really hard. Even then I get maybe 50-75%, but it was just taking too long, so I stopped and just wandered around.

Every so often I'd see something that I'd recognize from textbooks or my mom's art stuff, and take a picture of it. They're surprisingly lax about cameras there. Of course I saw the famous stuff, the Mona Lisa, a few more things by Da Vinci, some Botticelli, Cezanne, Monet, the victory statue, and a lot more. I really liked the exhibit with Etruscan stuff.

We got kicked out around 10, and walked out the pyramid entrance. It was dark, and with the pyramid all lit up, the blue Eiffel Tower and the lit up ferris wheel at Place de la Concorde, it was pretty. But also freezing, like 35ish degrees. Oh well. We found a reasonably priced cafe in front of Palais Royal, ate, and then hopped the metro to get back to the hostel. It would have been nice to enjoy Parisian night life, but the metro closes around 1:30, it had been a really long day, and the next day was only going to get longer. We got back around 12:45 and crashed.

On Saturday morning we got up to meet Lindsey's friend Olivia near Notre Dame. She is a french history major and has been in Paris for the semester. Her french is also good, so she was really really helpful, and took us on a walk through the city to some really cool places, describing the history as she went. She was really nice to have spent her entire day playing tour guide with us.

She started us off at Notre Dame. Outside in the front is a plaque from which all points in Paris are measured- it's the center of the city. Notre Dame itself really doesn't look that big (compared to other giant churches I have been to) on the outside, but from the inside, it is gigantic. There's not really much you can say about the church itself that will do it justice; it's one of those you have to be there kind of things.

It did make me want to watch the Hunchback of Notre Dame though. Maybe I'll watch that this week (: Anyways we were lucky and there wasn't really a line, which was the case with most places we went during the day. We didn't go up to the towers, but just toured around the inside and then continued down Ile de la Cité.

Next we went to Sainte Chapelle, the old royal church attached the the Conciergerie, the royal palace used before the royal family moved to Versailles. I think of all of the churches that I have been to before, this one is my favorite. Please look at my pictures, or google image it or something, because it is so so so pretty. Even the part of the church that wasn't for the royal family was beautiful.

Since St. Chappelle is right next to the Conciergerie, we wet there next. If Olivia hadn't been there, I would know almost nothing about this building. It's sort of difficult to imagine the place as a palace, since it is preserved in "it's last historically significant condition," as a prison that it was converted to after the royal family moved. It's actually pretty neat to see how they had converted area to prison cells, and it has some artifacts from the French Revolution and Terror, when it housed a lot of political prisoners. This is where prisoners were kept before they were executed.

You could actually see where Marie Antoinette spent her last days- where her old cells used to be and things like that. The whole thing was slightly creepy, but still pretty cool. From there we walked down Rue St. Honoré next to the Seine on our way to Place de la Concorde. On the way there, Olivia took us into the courtyard of the apartment where Robespierre lived with the Dantons. Next door was this really cute bakery, the Delices de Manon, which had a penguin chocolate wafer thing. It was delicious.

Sometime on our way Olivia took us through this enclosed plaza with trees and stuff that was surrounded with little shops, all of which were either extremely expensive old cafes from the 1700s, or high priced antique places. Here there was a café where Napoleon used to hang out when he was a student in Paris, and in front of another café, the place where the French revolution pretty much started was marked on the wall.

From there we ended up at Place de la Concorde, which has had a few different names, and used to be the place where prisoners were guillotined. This is where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were publicly executed. There was this giant Ferris wheel called the Grande Roue there, and also a big obelisk that the French stole from Egypt. From there we went down the Champs Elysee toward Arc de Triomphe. There was actually a Christmas market going on there, and it was fun to walk around. Arc de Triomphe is pretty, it just sort of sits there, so we hopped the metro to go over the Musee Carnavalet.

Musee Carnavalet is a museum on French history spread out across a few fancy houses of the old nobility. It's smaller, but pretty interesting, so we stayed there until we got kicked out around 6. From there Olivia took us to where the Bastille used to be. The building itself is gone, there are just some markers on the plaza, but now the area is big for nightlife. We walked around the streets and found a restaurant, and just relaxed for a bit.

Afterwards we took the metro again over to the Eiffel Tower, which was lit up all blue to look like the EU symbol. We went up to the top in the elevator and you could see the whole city lit up- it was so pretty. Although it was windy and freezing up there, it was worth it. It was also pretty cool to see all of the different places that we had been to during the day from up there. While we were up there, it "sparkled-" they had attached strobe light aaaall over the tower, and they turn then all on when the hour changes at night.

We took the stairs down, and by the time we had gotten all the way back up past the gardens, it sparkled again! We grabbed some warm up hot chocolate at a cafe looking out at the Eiffel Tower, and then got back to the hostel around one again. It was such a long day, that most of us were practically falling asleep at the cafe, so we just went to bed. Sort of- I stayed up a little to finish some postcards. I was facing the window of the hostel, and while I was there it started to snow! It was a pretty snow, with giant snowflakes- so I saw my first snow of the season in Paris this year!!!

On Sunday morning we packed up our stuff and checked out of the hospital. From there we were to Luxembourg Gardens to walk around, and passed by the Danton statue on the way. Everyone went to grab some crepes, but I went on a mad search to find stamps. On the way to find stamps I actually walked by the Sorbonne, and some Cluny remains. Then it was off to the airport, and home to Barcelona!!

It was a really good weekend, and although I didn't expect to, I really loved it. I liked all of the different neighborhoods, and the history behind everything and it was just a really nice city. It was beautiful even in the winter, and in the spring I bet it is ridiculously gorgeous. I would go back there in a second.