ah! Parie!

this weekend we went to Paris, i forgot my notebook so you won't be getting day by day notes, sorry. we went there by the eurostar which goes under the tunnel which i would have loved to have watched out the window until we went into the tunnel, but i was in a seat backwards so to keep from getting motion sick i slept the whole way.... it was early in the morning when we started out and the train ride was only two hours so that helped but i was very sad i couldn't watch at all, on the way back i was facing forwards but it was night so i couldn't see anything. sadness
we got to paris around lunch time and had a three hour bus tour, it wasn't as bad as the Edinburgh tour we got to see the major sights and things like that which was good. after the tour we went to our hotel which had amazing beds so comfy! and our window lead out to the roof which of course for a little while i walked on cause i could :). since it was the first day and we were still rather tired, my group just walked along the Seine river and just wondered about like you should do on your first day anywhere. i got my first paris print so that if i didn't have a chance to get one again i would have it. it was a lot of fun just walking along the river looking at stuff. since we were on the content they don't have dinner until late so at our normal dinner time or just before we had crepes, which was fun. then towards their dinner time we found a little french restaurant, one of the girls in my group spoke french so she translated the menu for us and spoke to the waiter in french which was pretty cool. they have 3 course meals as the main thing, so if you look for it you can get soup (or an apittizer) main course and desert for 10 euros, which is pretty good. during that day we also walked by the green boxes which are on the banks of the river they sell a lot of touristy things but also books, tons and tons of really really old books! i was very excited at first but then when i looked at the books, they were all in french which made me sad.... it makes sense for them to be in french but they didn't even have any good english books! they had some really neat looking old books for 2 euro each!! but i couldn't get them cause i don't know french nor do i know anyone who would want one who does know french.... sad day!
on the second day we did all the things we need to do, we went first to the Louve saw the mona lisa of course and then i went to go see the paintings from Flanders since that is where my name comes from just to see since there wasn't anything else i really thought i wanted to see. i broke off from the others went to see that then headed to our meeting place which was the statue of Venus that for some reason is famous still don't know why cause i've seen many other statues of her but apparently that one is famous so it was  a meeting place. the others had a much larger area to go through so they weren't there so i wondered around the area and the floors connected to that one, which included the medieval Louve section. i thought it was going to be a whole bunch of medieval painting and such but it wasn't it was the old walls of the basement which i loved! it was so quite down there because it was still decently early in the day, well maybe not actually it might have been 12 or close to that so lunch time, in any case not many people down there. i went on this one off shoot of it and it was a center stone column wall type thing but the amazing thing about this one was there was only me and this one other person who walked in before me and he had rubber soled shoes on so there was no noise in there at all, it was so cool (in the cold format of the word) and quiet i loved it, unfortuantly when i took some of the others down there for they wanted a picture with the wall since it is mentioned in Kate and Leopold there were a lot more people down there making it not as quite as i remembered.
after the Louve we went and got baguettes and ate them by the river which was fun accept my sandwich tried to leak all over me! i foiled its plot though with a  napkin and leaning. we also figured something i thought was interesting out, the river boats only go one way at certain times, when we were there it was only going up the river never down, its too small for two of those barges to pass each other i think. after lunch (which was like 3) we headed to Notre Dame where we were supposed to meet up with someone else, they got lost trying to find us, and ended up finding us when we were in the cathedral. it is a beautiful cathedral but at the same time simple, the outside is what is most amazing about it. originally it was painted many bright colors and i wonder why it is not still that way today it would make it that much more amazing (?) vibrant(?) i can't think of a proper word for it.... as we had to leave because the cathedral was about to have mass, it started to rain... we were going to go and climb the eiffel tower then but decided to wait on that since on the way to the metro stop we got soaked. so we headed back to the hotel for a bit of rest before heading out again for dinner. dinner was a stranger affair, we were all starving by the time we headed out and one of the girls wanted a salad that wasn't really expensive so we found a place that had 10 euro salad so that is where we went. i ended up having a weird sounding dish that was like meatloaf with an egg on top pretty good actually. i did have some red wine with my meal, i don't like wine at least not red wine, the first sip was good but after that it just went down hill, i did not finish it, it wasn't expensive wine which was good apperently wine in Paris is very cheap, not sure if that's just the quality or just the price or both but i'm not drinking red wine again cause i don't like it.
so then on sunday we climbed the eiffel tower and yes we climbed it! it was cheaper and a shorter line to climb the tower then to ride up a elevator, unfortuatly you can't climb to the very top but you get really far up so we were ok with that. there were too many stairs for me to count how many i climbed but it was a lot!!!
after the eiffel tower the group split up some of them were going to the Louve and things of that nature since the day before they had gone to Versailles, then some went to the impressionist art museum, then the group i was in went to the green boxes! i do so love those.
i wanted to get a better idea of what all was in those boxes plus i wanted to get another painting if i could find anything and family gifts and such. i had already gotten a print of the eiffel tower in Autumn and now i got a painting of Notre dame at night or with a very blue sky; as well as family gifts but i'm not going to tell you what those are :) there was one painting i saw that i really wanted but i saw it from the bus and never saw it again, it was of a girl with gourgous background and all the right colors i thought but i could not find it so i got other paintings that are just as good. i think i'm now going to look for a few prints or paintings from london to go with those either in my room at home or my dorm room it all depends. we just wondered and wondered around that area having a good ol time, before that we had lunch and it took us forever to find somewhere to eat! we ended up having something i'd never had before a crepe with meat in it! it was really good. then we took the metro back (oh and once we found a double decker underground train!!!! it was so weird and cool at the same time) to the hotel and left from there. and that is the paris trip.
now back to real life.....
from london with love