Paris Adventures!

I'm on my fourth day back from vacation in Paris and I wish I could go back. When Nathalie told me, "Paris est la plus belle ville du monde," she wasn't kidding. After searching through typical French streets that make no sense, my traveling buddy Caitlin and I finally found our hostel. By that time it was dark and we spent all of two minutes deciding what we should do first in Paris after dark. The Eiffel Tower! After hopping off the metro and peering over squat apartments and cafes, there it was. The icon of France glowing golden and standing proud. If only someone could have filmed my reaction--I don't think I've ever made such a squealy, girly sound in my life. Finally, I have done something I've dreamed of doing my entire life. I have stood at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and peered to the top of the symbol of France and now--the symbol of everything I've worked so hard to achieve.

After our first adventure, we returned to our hostel to be de-romanticized for the night. We had our own room and bathroom, but that didn't keep the noise out. And our shower functioned with one of those annoying buttons you find in public restrooms that you have to push so many times you wonder why you're washing your hands in the first place. Imagine that in a shower.


The next day we started early at Notre Dame--the oldest cathedral in Paris whose construction began in the 1100s and continued for 200 years. This is of course the church that inspired the story of Quasimodo which in turn inspired the renovation of many national monuments in France. And the cathedral is incredible--one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. The stained glass windows are magnificent. The inside of the church just felt sacred. People have poured out prayers, lamentations and confessions of love, hope, sadness, desperation and anger for almost a thousand years right there. It's incomprehensible. And after waiting in line for an hour, we climbed the four hundred steps of the towers that served as muses for the Disney movie and discovered that the images appearing in the movie are exact. The gargoyles actually look like that! They even have the same personalities. I also learned that the bell of Notre Dame was baptised "Emmanuel." Strange coincidence.

After that, we took a twenty minute train ride to Versailles--the cozy home of Louis XVI. Ha-right-cozy. Pictures can not even portray how huge this place is. Not only is it huge but it's also decked out in gold and marble. And tourists! We waited in line for so long to gain entrance into the castle and even then, I couldn't get a single picture without someone else in it. There were so many people there, it made the castle seem small--quite a feat if you ask me. But, despite all of that, we got to experience the architectural grandeur, the artistic genius, and the gaudiness of Louis and Marie Antoinette. I don't know how anyone got anything done--or slept for that matter. There's so much going on in each room. Especially the sun room which was covered in mirrors and had chandeliers hanging every two feet. Art on the walls, floors, ceiling, decoration on every surface of everything, mirrors everywhere, chandeliers everywhere...even looking outside is distracting. The gardens were fantastic! Speaking of gardens--peaking out one of the windows to the garden, we were able to witness wedding photography in process. Ladies--eat your heart out is all I can say, because no wedding venue will top Versailles. This was definitely one of the top things I have seen while here. We spent quite a bit of time there and left tired, excited and sad to leave what we wish could be our home!

How would you like to have THIS as your sun room! Or that as your bedroom. Or THIS as your wedding. The gardens of Versailles. Every woman at the castle that day is jealous of her. I guarantee it.



Our next day was the most ambitious day of the four. We saw so many things and walked so many places that we couldn't even do anything but lay in our beds in the hostel when we got back. But it was incredible! We started off the day searching for the Bastille. We knew that the storming of the Bastille is France's Independence day, but we didn't actually know what we would find when we got there. It turns out there IS no Bastille. It's a monument for what it USED to be. That's it. So, we took our pictures and moved on to the next thing--but hey--we SAW it. After that we visited an Arab exhibition which was very interesting. However, we forgot about the time change and had to wait another hour before it opened. So we walked along the Seine and saw the Notre Dame from another beautiful angle--took the most postcard looking picture of my entire trip. We also saw ANOTHER wedding going on--pictures were being taken on the steps of the Seine. Seriously. Jealousy.

Anyways, I learned quite a bit about the daily life of Arabs from a thousand years before Christ until now. Sadly, though, we weren't permitted to take pictures--the same at the Musée d'Orsay. But, I can show you a picture of the outside! And then tell you the one awesome thing I saw inside that I will NEVER forget-Van Gogh's self portrait! OMG! I feel so cultured. After that, we trucked it over to the Opera House. Anybody who knows me well enough to know my obsession with Phantom of the Opera knows that this is a huge deal. So it was also terribly devastating discovering that the whole front of the opera house was under construction. But who cares--I was in the opera house. The. Opera. House. I think I would've peed my pants if I had the opportunity to watch an opera there. I ran up and down the stairs of that place like a child in a grocery store, snapping pictures of everything and making some sort of excited noise about it all. What I REALLY wanted to do was run around and sing opera songs the entire time I was there. But, I was already being a nuisance as it was--best to not be kicked out :( I have to say though, I didn't get a picture of it, but the ceiling in the theater was really strange. It looked like a child took a crayon to it. I was expected some elegantly painted ceiling and it looked like something I drew for mom to put on the refrigerator in second grade. But, again, I don't care. It was the opera house.

View from Montmartre

After that, we went from elegant, to not so elegant, and back again. Our next stop was--the red district of Paris--the Moulin Rouge. We didn't go inside--we were quite content just taking pictures of the gaudy neon lights and giggling at all the vulgar poses people found necessary to do for their pictures in front of the windmill. To feed Caitlin's coffee addiction, we rested in a Starbucks for a few minutes (like I said--not so elegant?), then moved on to Sacre Coeur at Montmartre. It's rumored that from here, you have the best view of Paris. Well...rumors are fact. The church sits on top of a huge hill with A TON of steps that we ran up to get pictures before the sun set. Quite an impressive view. From this vantage point, we could pick out everything we had seen and in turn get excited about the things we were going to see. All while standing next to this beautiful white church. It was the perfect way to end that exhausting day.


Our next exhausting day was to start out at the Louvre! I could fill five hundred blogs with the pictures I took of this place. It's even bigger than Versailles. I couldn't even fit a fourth of this thing in my camera. When I studied the home of Louis XIV in school, I remember reading that the castle was so big, they could only live in one side of it for half of the year. Then, they moved everything to the other side for the other half of the year. Can you even imagine? If you all thought moving Gram and Papa twice a year was hard, think about moving a castle twice a year! Anyways, this is of course THE place to find famous art pieces. Top three-Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa and Winged Victory. We managed to walk through I'd say about seventy-five percent of the Louvre in four hours. That's just walking--not stopping too long to admire anything--because if you want to see anything at all you can't look at EVERYTHING. There's stuff from the Americas, Africa, Italy, France, Ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt, etc., etc., etc. You know what--I'll just let you enjoy the pictures. I will say one last thing though--I did feel like quite the anachronism standing inside that giant glass pyramid. It is an odd thing.

We ended this day very slowly. If my feet could yell at me, they would. We walked along the Champs-Elysees for just a little bit, ate at a fantastic Italian restaurant (the best lasagna I think I've ever had--and chocolate mousse), and then saw the Arc de Triomphe. From both sides, because apparently we weren't smart enough how to figure out how to get underneath it. But, we didn't care. We were tired and wanted to go to the hostel and relax in order to survive the next day. We were to be kicked out of the hostel at nine thirty with all of our things and our train left at seven in the afternoon. So, we carried our bags around for quite some time.

Stop! It is here the empire of the dead

But, we did end our Halloween weekend in a way that I will never be able to repeat again in my life. Best. Halloween. Ever. First thing in the morning after leaving the hostel, we visited the Catacombs of Paris. After doing a bit of research (thanks, Mom), I learned that when Paris was expanding, they had to move the bones of people buried in cemeteries around the city. What better place to move them than underground? Thousands and thousands of bones for miles lie under the city in the catacombs. They call it the graveyard of the innocents, or the "Empire of the Dead." Please, think of a creepier name. We started our descent with just plain tunnels, expecting to see memorials, or headstones in walls, or something. I'm not really sure what we expected to see, but it definitely wasn't walls lined with bones! Apparently, some priest decided it would be a good idea to put the bodies in symbolic positions. This holds no good feelings for me. It just made it creepier. Seriously though, for miles underground, the walls are lined with skulls and bones. the entire underground of Paris is the catacombs or the metro. Try to conceive what that means. It means that my Halloween was AWESOME! I've never been so creeped out in my life.

We ended our trip with one more trip to the Eiffel Tower during the day time. It wasn't so pretty outside, but it was still the Eiffel Tower. We also saw the Hotel des Invalides. It was a pretty building, but by this time, all we really wanted to do was go home, use a real shower, and go to bed! But, I can't wait to go back!