Parlez vous Francais?

Nope, not me. I don't speak a word of French. And it hasn't been a problem at all! The guy at the reception still practices his German with us, what a funny guy. I think we just LOOK like foreigners, lol... maybe it's my sneakers? Or that I'm carrying a map? Dunno.

I should mention that I'm sitting in the "Ab-Doer" as it's called, in our room :-) So far, we have no roommates. Hope it stays that way :-) The place is small enough already!

Anyway, we got up at 7:15 this morning and were out on the road by 8am... I bought a chocolate croissant which was yummy, and purchased from the first unfriendly Parisian I've met since we arrived here. We first set out to find the Eiffel Tower. We took the Metro closest to us as far as we could and started walking toward the river, since it appeared on the map that the Tower was close to the river. We walked all the way to the river and were about to cross the street when suddenly, Vendy was like "there it is!" and we were looking like dummies the whole time when it was right behind us! We even had walked by it a few times and didn't even notice. So we walked over to it and took a LOT of pictures. The wind was blowing like crazy and it even rained a while while I was munching on my croissant this morning. Not exactly romantic Paris weather.

We walked a while and found the Statue of Liberty... the smaller, 35 foot tall replica of the real thing, which was a gift (pales in comparison!) to France from some Americans. Sweet. It was so windy and although the rain pretty much had stopped and it was sunny, the wind just made us pretty much miserable. It was still cool though, seeing all of the stuff!!

Afterward we wanted to head to the Louvre... we couldn't find the Metro station, so after buying a keychain from a Turkish/Arabic street vendor, I asked him where it was. I gave him a postcard of the Metro map to write on, and he told me exactly which ones we'd have to take to get to the Louvre, and then he turned the postcard over and wrote his phone number and "I like u. kiss. Rashid". I gotta remember to take a picture of it and post it on Facebook; it's hilarious. I just said thanks, awkwardly, and walked away.


Right when we got there, we had no idea where to go. It is simply huge inside, just the reception area! I was actually really hungry, but we didn't eat; we were too excited. In a museum like that, it's really hard to look at everything because there is just so MUCH! And we have only one week, so we knew we had to spend our time wisely. Some of the highlights in the Louvre that we saw include the Mona Lisa, the sculpture of Venus, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. I still would like to see Michelangelo's "The Dying Slave". Saw a lot of stuff I remember from 10th grade (European history!). After a while we decided to leave (I was starving and had a headache because of it). We went to the Concorde square, where the 3300 year-old Egyptian obelisk is, and I bought a ham/cheese crepes. It tasted ok. We sat in metal chairs around the fountain in the Tuilieries gardens. Aside from the wind, it was pretty sweet.

After my lunch, we took the Metro over to the Arc du Triomphe, and climbed to the top! It was really cool (and cold)! You can really see just about everything from up there. The Arc itself is just magnificent; it's in the middle of this roundabout that has about 3 lanes to it, with NO markings--people just drive. It is crazy. Afterwards, we headed back towards the Tuilieries gardens to the Orangerie Museum, where Monet's Waterlilies is housed. For some reason, I thought it was just one painting... well, it's not, it's like 8, and they're HUGE! Outside the museum there is a nice replica of the Rodin sculpture "The Kiss", which I'd never seen before, and, more than anything in the Louvre, this sculpture spoke to me. I just found it so refreshingly romantic and different from so much of the art I'd seen earlier. This inspired us to head to the Rodin museum, where several other such sculptures are located. The garden there is really nice! "The Thinker" is pretty much the most famous one in the garden. We wanted to go inside the museum itself, but they literally shut the door in our faces 5 minutes before closing time, lol...we didn't know it was closing time, ha ha... another rude Parisian, but so far, that's only #2.

We wanted to go to Musee d'Orsay, but it was closing soon, too, so we just decided to head home. We were both totally tired and my feet hurt really bad. We headed back to the hotel and unpacked a bit, and went right back out again in search of a good meal. I'd read in my guidebook about an "alley" nearby that was "crammed wall-to-wall" with Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani eateries, so we decided to seek it out. We found it, but only half of it, and were sort of disappointed in what we saw in regard to the selection. It turns out we completely missed the other half (saw it after we ate), which wasn't labeled "Passage Brady". That area of town had a loooottt of strange lookin' characters in it; I felt a little nervous as it started to get dark. There were lots of black people (don't take this the wrong way), but I just felt nervous, OK!? There were just lots of groups of black men standing around being loud. Lots of black hair salons and nail salons and such. We ended up eating real cheap at this Indian place (which did NOT compare to the Indian food I've eaten before)... we got Tandoori chicken, rice, some vegetable stuff, and a really good cheese "nan" bread. The water is FREE in France!! In Germany, they don't even offer it out of the faucet, and charge you over $3 for 6-7 oz. of the bubbly stuff, ha ha...

Tomorrow we're headed out a little later, since we'd like to see the city center at night.




Caitlin