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This weekend was the absolute best yet!!
We arrived in Paris at about 11:30 PM after an hour and 40 minute plane ride. My best friend of 16+ years Lindsay was at the hotel within minutes of our arrival so that we got to see eachother. She was in France visiting her sister who goes to school in Paris. Me, her, and her older sister Caitlyn went for a glass of wine then went home to go to bed - we both had early mornings the next day. They were travelling to south France for the weekend and we had a tour of the Louvre at 9:30. We left at 8:30 AM the next morning for our tour and the Louvre was only about a 15 minute walk away, but of course, we ended up at the wrong meeting place and missed our tour guide. After figuring out where we were actually supposed to meet, we sprint there and the people working the desk at the tour companie led us to our tour guide. This ended up working in our favor, because we ended up in a tour group of 6 (we were four of the six people) when they told us originally that our group could be as large as 50 people! And then, even better, the other two people left half-way through our tour so then we had our tour guide all to ourselves. She was an excellent tour guide: very personable and knowledgable. She knew who painted everything and when, and exactly where to go in the Louvre to see them, because they say it would take 9 months to see everything in the Louvre! After the Lourve, we caught our hop-on-hop-off tour bus to the Notre Dame Cathedral. We had lunch at the cafe on the corner then went inside the cathedral. It was absolutely the most beautiful thing I have ever seen! So massive and elaborate and ornate it was absolutely stunning! We then got back on our bus and went around the city seeing the Arc de Triumph and Eiffel Tower. After eating dinner and taking an extreme photoshoot at the Eiffel Tower, we went down to the river where we went on a Champagne tour and saw the city by boat. Our tour guide was extremely educated in champagne: he is earning his masters in wine-making here in Paris! How awesome is that?! After getting my first Parisian macaroon (chocolate almond, yum!), going home and freshening up, we went to see Moulin Rouge at 11 PM thanks to Laurel's mom! It was such a great show! All the songs were in French and the women were all topless which was a bit strange because the entire rest of their bodies were covered, but the performance was great full with great song and dance numbers. We didn't get home until about 2 AM.
After a less-than-full night's sleep, we started Saturday bright and early to catch the train to Disneyland Paris! It was so cool to see a Disney other than the one I've seen all my life. Some of the attractions were the same, like Tower of Terror or Rockin' Roller Coaster, or had different versions, like Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Carribean, Peter Pan, and Space Mountain, or were completely new like a whole Toy Story land, Indiana Jones, or Alice in Wonderland. The highlight of my day was Crush's Coaster, a ride based on the movie Finding Nemo in which you are sitting in a turtle shell and go on a roller coaster through the East Australian Current. It was unbelievably great and I had wayyyy too much fun. Me and my sea turtles! The park was like a smaller version of our Orlando Disney. it has two parks, similar to MGM and Magic Kingdom in Orlando. The MGM equivelant closed at 7pm, and the Magic Kindom one closed at 11, so after our last right at 10:59, we headed to the train station to take the hour-long train ride home. It was another long night, only to get up early again the next morning.
Sunday morning we woke up early yet again for our last day in Paris. We caught the train to Versailles. We had originally booked a tour before we left for our trip, but then late last week got an email from the company saying they weren't going to be able to take us on our tour because the meeting place was in the city of Paris and then we took a bus to Versailles, but the roads were all closed due to the Tour de France. We were upset because we throught this meant we were going to have to wander Versailles alone with no guidance. Much to our pleasant surprise, though, after getting off the train and getting in line to buy tickets, they had available spots on a skip the line tour that would be leaving only 15 minutes from when we got there. Of course we signed up and were on our way to Versailles! Thank goodness we got to skip the line, because when we got out of our tour 2 1/2 hours later the same people were STILL in line to get in! It had to be a half a mile of people winding around in lines outside the palace gates! We got to see the whole viewable inside of the Palace and the gardens out back. I wish it wouldn't have been as hot and that we had more time before our plane flight, because we only got to see2 of 27 gardens on the property. That's okay though because the two we saw were amazing! We then headed back to Paris to see our one last sight in Paris before heading to the airport: Love Lock Bridge. This is a walking bridg not far from the Louvre where couples write notes on a lock, lock it to the bridge, and throw the keys in the Seine River, lovking in their love forever. While I do not have a lover to lock a lock with, I do have an amazing family in my sorority that I love very much, so I locked a lock for our family ♥. We went back to the hotel, grabbed our things, changed our clothes, and headed to the airport to catch our flight back. Our flight was delayed about a half an hour, and then when we arrived the train was no longer running to bring us home so we had to take a taxi, but it all worked out and we arrived home at about 1AM.
It was a long, restless, amazing, adventure-filled weekend, and I could not be more thankful that I was lucky enough to be able to experience such amazing things!
Make sure to check out all the pictures I took, in the Paris album! I have officially filled up my memory card on my camera (16GB, who would have thought that wasnt enough?) Tomorrow on the way to school I'm hoping I'll find a store selling more. I don't want to delete them off the memory card in case my computer were to die and I were to lose them forever. And since that lasted me 3 weeks, exactly 1/2 of the trip, one more should do the trick to get me through the remainder, right? Hopefully I am successful!
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