Since when is the Eiffel Tower brown?! Paris 2011

Hello friends and family! I just got back from my first trip of many this semester. My friends, Attie and Brittany and I went to Paris from Thursday night until early Tuesday morning. We did so much and I am so proud that we were able to do so many things. I have TON to write about so I am forewarning you that you might have to read it in pieces. I'll break it up and put labels with every subject so you can skip around if you'd like!

Thursday and Friday
The Trip: so Thursday right after my class, my friends and I walked to the Sevilla bus station to take a 6 hour ride to Madrid to catch the plane there. (Everything is cheaper from the bigger, international airport.) Not much happened, except for the fact that I realized I know absolutely nothing of the French language. For example, when I saw the French yes spelled out, "oui", I thought was pronounced oowee, not we. *I didn't know it was the French yes or else I would have known how to pronounce it!* So with that knowledge in mind, just envision my fun in trying to pronounce/comprehend French this past weekend... unsuccessful. :). Anyways, once we got to madrid at 12am, we took a couple of different metros to take us to the airport, then camped out until 615am for our flight. The cheapest company to go through is always Ryanair, but the catch is that your bag must fit into their size requirements. Here is a picture of how small your bag has to be!

The Metro System: The first thing I got to experience in Paris was the metro system, which literally should be considered a "sight". I have NEVER seen anything as sufficient, yet complex in my life. There are 15 lines for the metro that each have around 30 stops. Sevilla was my first time using a metro, which has 1 line and maybe 8 stops (just to give you a picture of how complex this thing is!). There is literally a city underneath Paris filled with metros. It is so cool because once you get the hang out it (which we did), you see how accommodating it is. We took the metro everywhere we went this past weekend. It wasn't even a question if we should walk. It'd have taken forever. usually, to get to the main sights, we'd have to take 2 or 3 metro lines just to get there. Attie was the queen of this. She always knew where we were going and showed Brittany and I how to use it as well. I really liked the metro, except for the dirtiness of it. For those of you who don't know me well, you know that I hate germs. The fact that I had to sit on a dirty seat or hold on to a dirty pole and then smell the dirty smells of the metro was a bit unbearable at times. Other than that, we were always entertained by the different people that played accordions in the metro trying to make some money.

Hostel: Staying in a hostel was another first for me. We stayed in a 6 man room and all shared a bathroom. We had roomates from Poland and Zimbabwe and a girl from the states living in Granada this semester. We didn't see much of the hostel only to sleep, shower and eat our free breakfast. The one thing that grossed me out was showering without flipflops. Unfortunately, those were the one important things that I forgot. Brittany and I (another fellow germaphobe) ended up wrapping our feet in plastic grocery bags and then taking a shower. Lol, it was great. Here are some pictures of our hostel and dining room.

 Basilique du Sacre Coeur:  when we got to our hostel, we still had 3 hours until chek in, so we went to the highest point in Paris (on the butte, which means hill). Our hostel was in Montemart, which is acutally on the butte, so we were able to walk there. We took a bajillion steps, but it was totally worth it. Here are some photos of the church, which we went into to say a little prayer of thanks for our safe travels, and the great view of the city!

The Eiffel Tower: what does every tourist go to Paris for? To see the Eiffel Tower of course! At my first sight of the Eiffel Tower, I was extremely surprised to see that it was brown! Maybe because I've gone to Kings Island all my life and seen the fake tower, but I was totally expecting it to be a steel-bluish grey color. Oh well, the color didn't change how grande it was.We went up to the 2nd floor of the Eiffel Tower on this scary elevator that I was thinking was for sure going to drop us to our deaths. Well, it didn't and I was able to take some great pictures!

We went up the Eiffel Tower at the perfect time because it was right before the the lights came on and started flashing. Basically every hour on the hour (once it gets dark) the Eiffel Tower flashes. It was so breathtaking and exciting! I hope this video shows just how awesome it was!

After we got back down, I had my first taste of Paris' famous crepes. I got a Nutella and banana crepe with whipped creme. It was seriously the best thing ever! After that we just headed back to the hostel. We had only gotten 3 hours of sleep in the past 36 hours and were wiped!
Saturday:
Versailles: we woke up early Saturday and finagled our way to Versailles, which is the HUGE home of King Louis XIV. Unless you ahve seen it with your own eyes, you really can't fathom the greatness and hugeness of this place. King Louis XIV built his home to show the power of France, and in my eyes it really worked. It's hard to describe, so I'll just show some pictures to help explain:)

Oh..just the king's home.. 

Marie Anoinette's bed

One of the hundreds of rooms in the palace

Versailles does not just include a huge mansion, but miles upon miles of "gardens". There is a huge man made lake that the king kept war ships on, a village and another palace that Marie Anointte would stay in to get away from the royal life, and a huge farm. Here is a picture of the beginning of the gardens. You can't see the rest of them because it took us like a half hour to walk through the gardens just to get to the village.

***The cool thing that we lucked out on that we didn't know before we came to Paris is that with our Spanish visas, we're technically residents in Europe, so were able to get through the museums for free because all of the museums let 18-26year olds in for free. It was so great!

Musee D'Orsay:  this was one of the museums that I had heard great things about from friends that have already gone. however, I found myself quite bored. The museum had lots of older French paintings and sculptures from 1800s-early 1900s, which means a lot of naked pictures of women and men. Unfortunately, there were not pictures allowed, so I couldn't take any to show you what I'm talking about. I'll prove to you later in my blog that I do appreciate art, just more modern art, as I discovered at another museum!

Pont de Arcs: aside from the Eiffel Tower, this was probably my favorite thing taht I did. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for romantic things like this, but I think everyone would have loved it! Basically it's this bridge with thousands of locks on it with people's initials on the locks. Some have writing about love in different langauges which makes it like the international bridge of love, which I think is the cutest thing ever. We probably stayed on the bridge for an hour with the pouring, freezing, slanting rain drenching our jeans and jackets, but we didn't care, and hardly noticed because we were so mesmerized by the bridge. I totally want to have my initials up there one day!

I looked forever for MandJ (my mom and dad:))

Arc de Triomph and Champ Elsyees:  Saturday night we headed to France's version of Times Square. We walked down Champ Elsyees and window shopped and ate at a little cafe for dinner. (I'm going to pause here  to tell you how expensive everything in the stores were! I've heard that Paris is expensive, but never in my life have I seen a plain looking scarf for 70 euro! Crazyness!) At the end of Champ Elsyees is the worlds largest round about, Place de L'Etoile, and in the middle of that is the Arc de Triomphe, which is where an unkown WWI soldier has been laid to rest since 1920.

Sunday:
Louvre: the Louvre is one of the biggets museums in the world. Our hostel roomate was there for 5 hours one day and said she didn't even see half of it. The only reason we went was to see Mona Lisa and take a picture by the huge glass pyramid.

Notre Dame: we then headed over to the Ile de la Cite (1 of the 2 islands in Paris) and saw the Notre Dame. The inside architecture reminded me a lot of Sevilla's catedral. They were actually having mass while we got to walk around in the church. (I definitely wouldn't like going to church there because it'd be more like a spectacle then a quiet pensive mass session).

Afternoon in the Latin Quarter and Catacombs: For lunch on Saturday we headed into the famous Latin Quarter and grabbed some great lunch. Attie then took us to this famous bookstore that she had read so much about, called Shakespeare and company. It was the cutest place ever and was lined floor to cieling with books. It reminded me something out of the Harry Potter movie from one of the stores in Diagon Alley or something. It was great. After that we headed to something that I had read a lot about in my travel book, called the Catacombs. The catacombs are filled with 6million people's dead bones from the 18th century. Yes, SIX million people's bones. Basically what happened is that the common burial areas in France were so unsanitary and overcrowded that the government had to find another place to put them in. So they built an underground cemetary. It took us about 20 minutes to walk at a downhill slope to get to the bones. It was very claustrophobic ( i couldn't even stick out my arms and the ceiling was sooo low!) Here are some pictures:

Monday:
Pompidou Center: Monday morning before the Pompidou Center, we went and visited this really cool cemetery that we kept passing. We thought that it was the most visited cemetery because we had kept reading about it in our book, but it turns out we went to the wrong one! It was still neat though. We then headed to the Pompidou Center which was so neat! It's a building with it's insides turned out. All of the pipes and even the escalators were on the outside of the building! The actual building held a contemporary art museum inside, which I really enjoyed.

We left Monday afternoon at like 1pm and got back to Sevilla Tuesday morning at 5am. To say the least, I was completely exhausted after spending everyday touring Paris from like 830am-9pm. But it was totally worth it. I had such a good time and would love to go back!