Since we went to Disneyland the first day we had one day to do pretty much everything else in Paris—which resulted in us running around the city for at least twelve hours looking like energizer bunnies but hey, we did it! Our hostel was decent and had a kitchen so one of our goals was to find mac and cheese to make that night because we’re college students and college students+kitchen=mac and cheese. It’s a basic equation of life.
Lets start at the beginning though, with the best crepes you can ever imagine. We found this cute little café that had heaters (it was a bit chilly) right near the Notre Dame that had these amazing crepes. Sarah and I got nutella-bananna with whipped cream and they had these really good nectar-juice drinks, I had mango :) After breakfast (or dessert depending on which way you want to look at it), we kind of hopped on with a tour group walking buy that had a really funny tour guide talking about the Cathedral and Charlemagne and the Hunchback of Notre Dame and so on. We followed their group for awhile simply because she was a really good tour guide and then broke off because we wanted to go inside. The inside was gorgeous—especially all of the stained glass. There are two circles which are, if I remember correctly from Art History (and there is no guarantee that I remember anything from that class) they are called the Rose Windows or something similar. They are amazing and I will put a picture up soon—because I forgot to put one up earlier today, oopsies.
Thinking ahead we wanted to go check out the Eiffel Tower to see if we could get tickets to go up at night (we didn’t know that if you got a ticket you had to go up immediately). After taking pictures from just about every angle we talked about what we wanted to do for the rest of the day and decided that Danielle and Amy would stand in the hour plus long line to get us tickets for the tower (again we thought we could get tickets for a later time—our bad).
Meanwhile, Sarah and I wanted to check out the Louvre, specifically the Mona Lisa. We left the Eiffel Tower at 1400 and wound our way through the maze that is the Paris Metro (the subway) to the Louvre where we found out that every sign we saw pointed a different direction for the museum. We finally found our way to the actual entrance and after purchasing our tickets and finding a map written in English we promptly went directly to the wing housing the Mona Lisa (my mom is going to kill me for this by the way because I am sure she could spend an entire day and then some at the Louvre), vaguely noting the statues and paintings we quickly walked (ok sort of ran) past. We saw the Mona Lisa and took a good number of pictures after admiring the painting which, as I’m sure everyone who has seen it in real life has told you, is smaller than you would think. I wanted to see the statue of Aphrodite, so we wound our way through to that wing, again peripherally noting whatever we happened to pass. After that we attempted to walk directly to the Ancient Egyptian wing, only to find ourselves lost in a Medieval Moat. We eventually conceded and asked a somewhat crabby museum worker for directions. Finally locating the great sphinx and the statue of Ramses II we had finished our whirl-wind tour of the things we most wanted to see at the Louvre and then proceeded to see everything else on our way to the exit, as we passed through almost every single exhibit on the way out. We decided that anyone who wants to take a tour of the Louvre (a normal one, not the Colleen and Sarah speedy special) would simply have to walk to a random point in the museum and then follow the exit signs and inevitably they would walk through every exhibit on the way, therefore making their way through the entire museum. Leaving the Louvre in just under an hour after we entered, we attempted to re-trace our steps back to the Eiffel Tour and made it back by just after 1600 making our entire trip just over two hours.
We had been sitting under the Eiffel Tower for about five minutes when Amy and Danielle showed up begging us not to hate them. They then explained that when you wait in line for tickets you have to immediately go up and so they did—they also told us that they had bought Eiffel Tower mac and cheese for later. We were not mad at all and told them that as long as we could steal some of their pictures (and eat some of the macaroni) we would just go up later that night ourselves. We were all starving by then so we made our way to a near-by pizza place for dinner where our animated waiter teased us the entire time but made up for it by helping us figure out where the rest of the major monuments we wanted to see were located and how to get there. After dinner we hit up the Arch de Triumph, though we did not go up, and then headed to the train station to get tickets for the next morning. We made our way down to the Pantheon after that and then found a grocery store to buy supplies for our beloved mac and cheese. Amy and Danielle headed back to the hostel to make half of the mac and cheese for dinner and shower and Sarah and I headed back to the Eiffel Tower so that we could get our chance to go to the top.
Thankfully the line was much shorter when we got there and a good thing too because just as we got into the first elevator it started to rain. We made our way to the top and were mezmorized by the city lights sprawling below us. We took pictures of everything that we could and then hurried back down to get away from the rain and the wind. The inside part had a list of sorts running all around the edge and it pointed toward different monuments/natural wonders around the world and stated how far away they were and which country they were in. We made sure to take a picture of things from every country that we are visiting (or had visited) on the voyage and had fun exclaiming, “we’re going there, and there, and we have already been there…”
It was a great day but a tiring day and after making some mac and cheese (which was amazing by the way) we crashed and went to bed. Back to Belgium in the morning where we basically just hung out and traded pictures. Amsterdam tomorrow—more later.
Love and miss you all <3
~Colleen
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