Paris Weekend

Well, I am back in Bonn and I've got all the good scoop on what went down in Paris the last couple of days! Where to begin?...

I guess it is only appropriate to begin at the beginning....when poor Andrew missed the train with us! I am useless when it comes to directions, so for this whole trip I have basically stuck myeslf to whatever more directionally oriented are deciding to do. So, when I heard that Andrew was not on the train with us destined for Paris, I was freaking out more than he probably was for himself. It worked out, because less than 12 hours later we reunited in the Louvre at noon the next day. The showers in the hotel we were staying at were extremely small, but the equipment inside them...namely the showehead was the most delightful and poowerful shower I've been in in quite some time. The water pressure on those babies pretty much made me feel AMAZING.

With one full day in Paris we had our work cut out for us and had to see all the must see things that there were to see. We started in the Louvre and saw some priceless works of art; the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, The Winged Victory (my personal favorite) to name a few. After the Louvre we took the tram to the Notre Dame Cathedral. It is a beautiful gothic style cathedral, which looks great from the outside from certain angles. However, after seeing the Köln Cathedral, Notre Dame was not quite as amazing. I also happened to fall for a scam outside the famous cathedral when a woman asked if I spoke English. I said yes, and she handed me a postcard with a little paragraph. I thought I was reading it for her, because she seemed to wanting me to decipher the card for her, but it ended up telling me that her mother was dead and her sister has Leukemia. I gave her 20 euros and then shortly realized that there were 20 other girls exactly like her with verbatum post cards doing the same thing to other people like myself....bummer!!

After the cathedral we had lunch at a cool Italian place where I got...pommes!! We then took the metro to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and walked that all the way to The Arcul de Triumf. On that journey we saw some pretty legit break dancers! The Arc was amaying and the street surrounding it was just as mind blowing, because hundreds of cars were whizzing by not hitting each other somehow!

Shyanie and I got lost from the group there and had a nice walk through Paris to get to the Eiffel Tower. The tower is amazing to behold and one soon realizes why it is an international monument. It is one of a kind, nothing else in the world just quite like it. We then decided to WALK up all 670 steps to get to the halfway mark. We lost some group members along the way, but I'm sure they were very content with what they saw. For a select few, we journeyed all the way to the Sommet as they say in French. The view up there was...perfect. The whole city was laid out perfectly. I could literally trace with my finger everywhere I had walked and been that day. Even the monstrous Louvre looked like a cottage from up there. I told other group members that they didn't miss out by not going all the way up....but seriously...Y'all need to trek up there nextime!! My leg were visibly shaking when the decent was completed and I was back on the sweet sweet ground (I am very afraid of heights).

The best part of the day was yet to come however...MOULIN ROUGE!! That show was truly amazing and the highlight of my entire trip. I got to enjoy it with 6 other group members and we wined and champaigned while enjoying the spectacle. The show was breathtaking with the intricate constumes that wreaked of quality. The performers were all basically the strongest, healthiest, and fittest people in the world. The women looked like Olypian swimmers, with long and slender muscles, while the men all looked EXACTLY like the Olympian gymnasts. You really needed to be in the shape of your lives though to execute all they did in that show. The women were topless most of the time which definitely added to the experience! Also, the craziest part of the whole show was this guy who literally could balance himself on a needle point. I cannot even begin to describe what this man did...you simply must see it for yourself.

Paris is truly the city of lights...