The City of Love

This past weekend, Kristen and I went to Paris. It was a really great weekend. We were able to stay with Ibraheem in his apartment. He lives in student housing with other international students, so we had a great time meeting them.

When we got into Paris Friday night, we were pretty hungry after not eating all day, so food was the first thing on the agenda. It was unfortunately raining, so we ducked into one of the first restaurants we came across. None of us had ever eaten escargots before, so naturally that was our appetizer. I was amazed too at how much I liked it!

The rain stopped as we were finishing dinner, and we headed out to find the Louvre. It's free on Friday nights for students, so we wanted to take advantage of that! We get there, and it is really packed. It's a HUGE place that one could spend an entire day looking around and still not see everything. We found the Mona Lisa after a while. It really is pretty small, and sadly, I was a bit underwhelmed. Granted, I was ecstatic for seeing the Mona Lisa, but I had higher expectations for it.

That night we went to one of Ibraheem's friend's apartments to hang out for a while. A really cute Italian guy had made dinner, and everyone was sitting around in his apartment hanging out. It was cool to talk to people from so many different countries. I felt so uneducated though because everyone there was speaking English, but it was not their first language. Most people were at least trilingual. Seeing them makes me really want to keep up with Italian when I get back.

We woke up fairly early the next day because we wanted to pack in all the sightseeing we possibly could. It was a beautiful day, so we were in good spirits. As we walk under trees to find a cafe, a pigeon poops on my head! Luckily, I was wearing a hat that day, so I wasn't contaminated. For Italians, it's good luck when a pigeon poops on you, so I tried to take that optimistic attitude despite being slightly grossed out and embarrassed.

The day started with a great BREAKFAST!!! It sounds so silly for me to get so excited about breakfast, but nobody eats "the most important meal of the day" in Italy. Italian "breakfast" consists of quickly hopping in a bar for a caffè (aka espresso) and a croissant. Anyway, it was nice to have a breakfast, and we had some free entertainment. Three obviously intoxicated people sat on the sidewalk in front of us. We couldn't figure out if it was remnants from the night before or if these French people started hitting the booze early, but either way, it was pretty funny. At one point, one of the men stood up, took the legs of another man who remained seated, and started humping him!! I couldn't believe it. We definitely don't see things like that in Perugia.

After breakfast, we went to Notre Dame.




The spirit of Quasi Modo got into Kristen



Esmerelda has aged a bit.


Then we climbed the hill to the Sacre Coeur. A man was singing, so we sat for nearly an hour listening to Youri and looking out over Paris.




We then tried to find the Champs Elysees, but the signs were sending us on a wild goose chase. We finally gave up and decided to head back to Ibraheem's place. Kristen and I wanted to go to a DJ Shadow concert, but it was all sold out. We didn't get our hopes up, but instead bought some champagne and headed for the Eiffel Tower. It's amazingly beautiful at night!! I'll wait to get pictures from Kristen to show us at the Eiffel.



Sunday was rainy, but we found the Champs and walked around for a bit. We weren't there long when we had to pack up to leave. We took a late flight into Rome and there weren't any trains that night that left Rome and got to Perugia that night. Because of this, we were expecting to stay in the Rome Termini train station all night. We didn't know that it closes at 1 a.m., so we were stuck in the McDonald's across the street until 4:30 when Termini opened again. We took the 6 a.m. train back to Perugia and got in just in time to go straight to our 9 a.m. Italian classes.

We were exhausted after a sleepless night, but it was totally worth it. Paris is stunningly beautiful, and everyone was really nice to us. I'm excited that I get to go back with my mom and Kristin to end my European vacation.