Well the program has officially ended. That's a whole different post entirely that will be up shortly but for now I'm going to talk about my trip to Paris with Tess!
All semester Tess and I had been talking about going to Paris together. Time after time it kept now working it out so we decided we would go after the program ended since I was flying standby home and she hadn't decided when she would be leaving. We left the same morning everyone else left for home, Friday morning. We landed in Paris around noon but didn't get into our apartment until around 3pm. We used a website called Air B&B to find a room to rent. Our host's name was Marie and she was so kind and helpful. We spent the afternoon exploring our neighborhood, getting crepes and relaxing in our awesome Parisian apartment.
Saturday morning we went up to the northern part of town to meet with an Australian blogger that Tess had set up a coffee date with to talk about what its like moving to Paris. Her name is Olivia and she makes amazing jewelry on Etsy. We had nice chat and then made our way to the center of the city to the Louvre. However, when we got there we discovered that because we had bought our tickets online, we had to go pick up our tickets on the other side of town. After we finally got our tickets we decided to leave the Louvre for Monday and instead went to see the Arc de Triomphe and Eiffel Tower. We got off the metro at the Arc de Triomphe first and ran across like 6 lines of traffic to get to it. Apparently that's illegal; you're suppose to use the underground tunnel, or so says the police man who stopped us. After checking that out we went to the Eiffel Tower and walked around the park. Then we walked long the river back to the Notre Dame. Then we walked back through town and through Luxemburg Parc and back to our apartment after our long day of seeing the city.
Sunday was our day at Versailles! We left early to catch the metro, it was suppose to be easy to get to on the C train. However when we got to the transfer, the station was closed. We found a Canadian couple who were also trying to get there so we ended up sharing a cab the rest of the way there. We thought that maybe because the C train wasn't running and it was still pretty early that the crowds would be minimal, but no. Even though we bought our tickets online earlier, we had to wait in line to get inside for at least 1/2 hour in the cold. Finally once inside we got to see the beautiful palace including the hall of mirrors, the king and queen's bedrooms and rooms filled to from floor to ceiling with art. But the palace wasn't even my favorite part. Once we got out into the garden, I was completely in love! The gardens are so big it was impossible to see it all and still have enough energy to move at the end of the day. We explored on our way to the third area of Versailles: the Grand Trianon, Petit Trianon and Marie Antoinette's farm. We went into the Trianon palaces then explored the gardens and onto the farm. So beautiful and charming! Anyone could see why a queen would build a retreat like that.We could have spent even more time exploring the gardens expect we were exhausted and starving! We made sandwiches but had left them in the bag we checked in at the beginning. By this time the C train was running again so we hoped on that back to our apartment.
We thought we were done for the evening but Marie's friend Samuel came over and offered to drive us around the city! We jumped at the opportunity to see Paris by car as the sun was setting. It was so beautiful! The Eiffel Tower against a hot pink sky is not something I'm soon to forget.They dropped us off in a good area for crepes and I ate the most delicious cheesy potato crepe of my life!
On Monday we were back at the Louvre and this time we had our tickets in hand! On thing we forgot to bring/grab however was a map. The first thing we did was run to the Mona Lisa before is got too busy. Then we spent hours exploring the museum. We finally decided to try and track down a map since we could NOT find the Code of Hammurabi. We asked a young woman working there if she had any maps but the only ones she had were in Japanese. We took one and Tess said we would learn Japanese quickly and the woman gave us the typical Asian peace signs and said "good luck!". It was so funny we just laughed the rest of the way through the museum. We left the museum and walked through the Louvre garden and wondered around a bit. We found a Christian Louboutin store (almost died)
