the little views.

this is real life.

Sunday at Versailles.

Picnic by the canal.

It was insanely crowded. INSANELY.
 I wont bore you with pictures, because most of them look like this:

Heads & ceilings.  It was beautiful and massive but honestly too crowded to fully enjoy. A shame.



Mirror pic in the HALL OF MIRRORS.

This pretty girl and I were so caught up talking that we missed our train stop on the way back.  Oops?  After hopping off two stops late we had to find the nearest metro, transfer 3 times, and go a total of something close to 14 stops. It was an adventure. 

I love being lost in Paris.

I heart Paris.

Sacre Coeur.

macarons.

St. Denis.

fireworks at the Grand Arch.

magic.

the end of Paris, week I.

Friday.
This is me. 

In a public toilette, aka the nicest portapotty in existence ever. 

Which took Jessica and me a full 25 minutes to figure out how to use. 

I started by asking a pharmacist "Oo son las toilettes?"  in broken french and he pointed a general direction. Sweet. Finally found them and waited in line. I went in after a man, but couldn't figure out how to shut the automatic sliding door. I tried everything, but all it would do was beep and yell at me in French. I DON'T SPEAK FRENCH.  Finally the doors started closing, I unbuttoned my pants, and the door opened again.  Exasperated, I stepped out and read the sign on the front. Oh. In English it explained that the potty does a full wash cycle after every single use, dousing the floors and the entire inside.  So I had to wait for the wash cycle to finish, go in, close the doors, use the bathroom, choose the "size of my flush," put my hands under the faucet that dispensed soap, then water, then dried them, and then press the doors to open again. It was quite the ordeal.

This incident occurred while the rest of our group was waiting in line for the catacombs.  That's right. We walked through the bone tunnels of underground Paris.

When I say "bone tunnels" I literally mean kilometers and kilometers of paths lined with...bones.  About 5 feet high and 5 feet deep, it looked. Corridors and corridors of bone piles.  They dug up the graveyards of Paris a few centuries ago and stuck them down here.  I probably should have felt more disturbed or creeped out, but I just thought it was the neatest thing ever!  Best 4 euros I've spent yet.

Happy Halloween!

On a similar note.....................

...............................we then went to the aquarium. 

(PS I just wrote a post for every day of the week, so feel free to go back and look!)

Thursday.

Thursday started with the George Pompideau museum.  Modern art.

Kandinsky, Rothko, Warhol.

As for the rest.........

That's all I have to see about that.

A deportation site of French Jews during WWII.  A stone for every French Jew sent to concentration camps from this spot on the Seine river.  It was sobering.

The #1 cathedral in Europe that I wanted to see:  Saint Chapelle.  

GOOGLE IMAGE IT RIGHT THIS SECOND.

Done? K good because my pictures can't do it justice.   It was ethereal. That's the only word I can use to describe it.  It was everything I had hoped for and more; I only wish I could spend 100 years in there.

Quick stop for a Nutella crepe.

AAaaaaand then back to Notre Dame, this time to ascend the bell tower.  It was a lot a lot of spiral stairs, but worth it. So worth it.

Ummm.....Quasimodo moment?  (By the way, Quasi was a real person! Just not the person Disney depicted. Gahh I want to share everything I've learned about everything.)

We were up there for an hour and a half, looking at the view and talking about life.

 I'm so excited for the friends I'm making here.

Final Thursday stop: going atop the Arc de Triumph.  So many spiral stairs. 

I'll have a hot booty by the end of this stay.

and then it was Wednesday.

Wednesday was pretty much amazing.  First stop: Musée de  l'Ongerie. Aka home to Monet's HUGE water lily canvases in an oval room that he designed himself. GOOGLE IT RIGHT NOW. Then ask me if I spent 45 minutes in that room alone. 

Because yes, I did. 

Next stop: the Louvre.

Ask me if I teared up when I saw Nike of Samothrace and made excuses to go back and look at her six times throughout the day.

Because yes, I did.

Ask me if I have the best life ever because YES I DO!

I seriously don't even know where to start with the Louvre other than saying it's HUGE. Like massive. Like picture the biggest building you can think of an double it. at least. 

Its wings are multiple city blocks long and it has THREE WINGS and 4 floors.

Words fail me when I try to describe the Louvre. Basically, it was a spiritual experience. Seriously. My heart was beating and I couldn't form coherent thoughts. I just FELT.  I saw all the masters, all the works you would expect to see. I can't even list all the things I saw and thought and felt.   

All the plaques are in French, so thank heavens I remember quite a bit from AP art history.  I guess the Louvre wants you to pay extra for an English audioguide. Psh. I'm poor. Like...really.  

In order to cover all the ground I wanted to, I made myself a map.

A few of the many, many works from AP art history.

 And yes, I saw the Mona Lisa.  Contrary to what I've been told I would think, she was bigger than I thought. But definitely as overrated as I expected. 

Lamassu!

According to Yahoo, "To see each of the 35,000 art objects in the Louvre, taking 60 seconds for each, would take roughly 25 days each of a full 24 hours."   So yeah. It's insane and wonderful.  

Suffice it to say... I spent 5 hours there, left to eat, and went back for 4 more hours with a different group.

Not a bad day at all.