Désolé, je ne parle pas français.

“GOOD MORNING WORLD!!!” is most definitely not what came out of my mouth this morning when my alarm went off at 430 in the morning.  You think they’d make cheap flights a little more convenient, but I guess we can’t win them all can we? Anyway, my flight out of “Paris” was at 9, and I had to be at a bus station to catch a bus by 6. I say “Paris” with quotation marks because this airport is actually an hour and a half outside of Paris. Ipso facto, if I had known that beforehand I probably could have just found a slightly more expensive flight into the city itself and saved on transportation and made things a little more convenient. But again, can’t win them all. I also had to figure out how to use the Night Bus system since the metro stops around 1 and doesn’t start up again until 530 in the morning there. Well long story short, I only ended up taking one of three buses I thought I was going to have to take because by the time I got to the one transfer station it was 530 and the metro was easier to deal with. Of course, the initial bus was later than I thought it was going to be, which meant a – I could have slept in 15 minutes later and b – I wasn’t making it to the bus station at 545 like I had wanted to, or by 6 like I needed to. So as the clock slowly ticked away the minutes on my ride through the Paris metro one last time, all I could do was hope there would be other buses leaving around the time I got there for the airport. And well, there were, so thankfully we have no Germany repeats. . (The buses to the airport leave 3 hours before each flight so luckily the airport is actually fairly busy and doesn’t have like 3 flights a day.) Anyway, here I am, currently sitting on the train back to Salamanca for my last 2 hour 45 minute stretch back home, attempting to update you beautiful people on the wonders of my life over the past couple of weeks.

So basically, Paris was gorgeous. Don’t think I would ever be able to live there for an extended period of time, but definitely an awesome trip. I’m going to let the enormous amount of pictures do the talking for me, but I’ll go through an abbreviated version of the weekend.

The language barrier was interesting. The French language is completely and utterly distinctive in its manner of pronouncing things. Between Spanish and English, it wasn’t too bad when reading some things – you could get the basic idea, which was good because in some of the places we went to (like the Louvre) there was no explanation of the pieces in another language other than French, which I was a little surprised at seeing how usually at really BIG places like this, there’s at least one alternative translation. But anyway, I seemed to just fall on Spanish as my default foreign language. Whenever someone asked me something in French, my first response was always in Spanish. Which was probably better actually, because then I would just ask in Spanish if they could speak Spanish or English, since they take to that better than just assuming they should know English (as most Americans seem to assume). Also whenever trying to ask for something I would pronounce it like I would in the Spanish language, and then just result to pointing if I had to. I think I can say I successfully avoided being the typical ignorant American while we were there. It was also interesting to be somewhere again where you literally did not know any of the language initially. We ran into this family from Chile on the first night, and it was like a breath of fresh air, because we were like, WE CAN UNDERSTAND SOMEONE YESSSS.

My plane arrived on Friday around 1230-1245 and I met up with Shank at the airport. Almost started to worry in Madrid (and by worry, I meant I started thinking, well here's yet another race to get somewhere in time, challenge accepted) because I had 30 minutes to get through all the airport security and crap and get to my plane. I had taken the 550 train to Madrid (the first one leaving in the morning) and then the subway to the airport, and well realized when I got there it was still cutting it a little close. However I'm also starting to realize getting through everything in Europe is not nearly as much as a pain as it is in the airports in the US, so I got to my gate with 20 minutes to spare. When we got into Paris we met up with two other friends and checked in at this hotel/hostel to get our information for where we were actually staying. The hostel we booked is more like a string of random apartments in the outskirt ghettos of Paris, so we had to check in at one place and then go to our actual apartment. Needless to say, when we arrived I felt like I was back in part of Philly, and as we looked around we further realized how bad we stuck out seeing how we were the only four white kids in the area. The room wasn’t too bad; I forgot to take pictures now that I think about it. We had a little kitchen which was nice and the beds were decent so hey, no complaints for what we paid for it. Although, we were supposed to have internet as well, but after trying to get that to work and calling the main desk and getting nowhere we just kind of gave up because it was kind of useless. So during the weekend we just resorted to crashing a McDonalds to borrow their free WiFi whenever we actually needed the internet to figure something out. Also, we had a pretty good location in respect to the metro station. We only had to hop on the metro right by our place and make one transfer, maybe two pending on where we were going, and we could be right in the heart of Paris. Friday night we went out and walked around a bit, and grabbed dinner at this one place.

Saturday we hit the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Eiffel Tour. The Louvre is split up into three parts, and it’s freaking huge. We started out looking at almost everything in the first section, then during the second one we went to we got a little more selective, and then by section three and hour three we were basically on a mission to find the Mona Lisa and maybe one or two other things in that part. The place is large enough to make a day trip out of. Notre Dame was neat, it was free to get into that day so the line was huge and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet at that point so we were pretty content with grabbing some food and sitting outside of it instead. We spent a good 3 hours at the Eiffel Tour, 2 and half hours of that basically consisting of waiting in line to get to the top of it, but it was definitely worth it. By the time we got to the top, it had gotten dark, so we got to see the entire city lit up, which was awesome. There was also a slightly overpriced champagne stand at the top, and well I couldn’t really resist. When I was in Argentina we drank wine at the end of a hike way up in the Andes Mountains on top of part of the mountain overlooking, like, everything, so I figured I’d add champagne on top of the Eiffel Tour to my list of drinking things on top of really, really tall things. We ended the night at this really (apparently) popular steak place for dinner. They only serve one plate – steak with their signature sauce and French fries. You get two plates of that, plus the initial salad and bread. It was absolutely delicious, and completely worth it. Naturally we complemented it with their house wine and dessert. We’re not going to discuss what the bill came to, and just leave it at that was the first and the last time I’ll ever spend that much on food in one sitting. But again, so freaking worth it.

Sunday we went to Versailles and spent a decent part of the day there. I’m definitely going to let the pictures do all the talking for that one, but it was a good time and definitely worth the trip. The visit ended with a race against time to get through the giant line to buy tickets for the train and then hop on before it left at like 5. We successfully boarded at 459. Win. Later that night when we got back we ventured out to walk around a good bit more.

On Monday two of our friends left so it was just me and Shank left. We went and checked out the Père Lachaise Cemetery, which is supposed to be the prettiest/most extravagant in the world. I went to another cemetery that was modeled after it in Argentina, so I was a bit curious to see the differences between the two. Monday was also Halloween so I guess it was also most appropriate to head there that day as well, and it was actually the first time I’ve been somewhere where it really felt like fall. We walked around a bit afterwards, and at one point we walked past a bakery and did a simultaneous head spin while still walking, and naturally at that point we had to buy some sort of magical pastry item. Later on met up with a friend of ours from school who’s studying in Paris for the semester. We grabbed dinner, which was not as expensive as the other night however was still really good, and then afterwards we headed to this place to do a river tour of the city, which was really cool.

And that leaves us back at this current point, as I’m slowly starting to fall asleep from the lack of it last night.

Hopping back to last week in the days leading up to the Paris trip – I was so fortunate as to have my midterms this past week. My two longest and hardest were on Monday, and Shank came up to Salamanca to visit me last weekend from Friday to Sunday. Naturally it was a good time, and naturally I pushed most of the studying back until Sunday. However, I was a good boy and I started some Friday before he arrived. But yeah, seeing how this was one of two times all semester I really had to study, it sucked and I didn’t want to do it, but I wasn’t complaining. However as we’re getting our marks back on all of them, we’re finding that the grading was a little more specific than we had previously anticipated, which is kind of ridiculous. When you have a midterm consisting of 5 essays, in which you have to “write everything you know about [insert title of work/picture here], you just start spitting out whatever information you can remember. Unfortunately due to my low attention span I also get really bored halfway through from writing down everything I know. I think after the two midterms during my four classes on Monday, my hand was ready to fall off from writing unnecessarily large amounts of information. If you’re grading on specific things, tell us! Don’t have us fill an entire page up with one essay and then take off random points because you failed to mention this or that, but remembered to write something else down that was completely unnecessary to remember.

Anyway, I took a bunch of short little videos of different things around Paris that I’ll post after this. Sometimes they come out better than the pictures themselves, especially if you’re moving around a bit.  

Campagne, anyone?

“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.”  – Pearl S. Buck