Perusing Paris: Part 1

When I returned from my run on Thursday morning, Isabel was sitting on her couch, hand on forehead and a distraut look on her face. "Do you know what happened?" she asked. I said no, so she preceded to tell me that she accidently fell back asleep after her alarm went off and was not able to give Luke his breakfast or say goodbye before our trip. "pobrecito" she kept saying, which means "poor thing." This is just how much our host mom loves us and it was sad but very sweet to see how worried she was.

The Louvre

Our trip began with a two hour flight to a city just outside Paris and a quick bus ride over to our hostel where we got our first look at that huge tower that everyone knows. It was pretty late at that point so we went right to bed after getting a quick tour of the hostel. We were a little worried about the quality because it was such a good deal for being downtown, but it ended up being a nice place. The only downside was the 8:00 breakfast, but it forced us to start our day early.

Friday, we took our first walk through the city over to the "Louvre," a huge building that is now a giant art mueseum. The courtyard has some giant glass pyramids that serve as the the entrance to the mueseum as well. It was here that we discovered we could get into all the mueseums in Paris for free because we had a student visa, a very exciting discovery.

The mueseum was gorgeous with too many beautiful works of art to admire in the short time we had. In every room, my eyes did not know where to look first. We quickly made our way to the Mona Lisa, where there was a swarm of people taking pictures of the very small but famous work.

Notre Dame

Next, we looked at all the statues, many of which I have seen in my history and art books, but never knew where they were held. My favorite statues were the Greek gods, being the fan of Greek mythology that I am.

After enjoying some sandwiches that Isabel gave us the day before, we went to our next famous landmark, the Notre Dame cathedral. It is the only cathedral with square towers instead of pointed ones. Honestly, I felt a little spoiled with the cathedrals because this one was not as imressive as the ones in Sevilla or Toledo, but it was obviously still very fancy and awesome to experience such a famous place.

Finally, we made our way over to the big landmark: the Eiffel Tower. It was easy to find in the night sky, and we ate dinner outside at a restaurant where we coud see it sticking its head out right over a building. The restaurant was frustrating because we could not speak French, so wehad to resort to pointing out everything on the menu foolishly. It made me realize how easy it is to get around Sevilla though, with the amount of Spanish I know.

Following the delicious meal, we sat in the park right in front of the tower. The pictures that we took in front of it looked like they were in front of a green screen because they were so surreal and perfect. Every hour, the tower started sparkling with flashing lights for about five minutes, so we stuck around for two rounds of that before making our way back to our beds.