Bummin' Around Paris

This first picture is just some really beautiful trees in a park near my house. Paris in the springtime is a totally different animal than Paris when it's freezing. So sorry for my abrupt post the other day. I just have been talking up my spring break trip for so long I wasn't in the mood discuss how a volcano in Iceland ruined all my travel plans. I'm ready to talk now. I know that things could be worse then being "stuck" in Paris for two weeks doing nothing, but I was so looking forward to the next few weeks. Right now I associate Paris with school, and also while I like my new host family it would've been nice to be able to be on my own for a little while. All hope isn't lost yet. We are still looking for trains to Italy to get us there by next week, here's to wishful thinking!

I can begin with Friday. I was so excited to leave. I checked my airlines website and they said nothing was canceled yet so I figured everything would be fine. I also checked the airport website and they said the airport would open at around 2:00pm and my plane was at 7:30pm so I figured again all was fine. I lugged my suite case to school. I was absolutely giddy through theater class until I decided to check my phone. I looked online at the airlines website just in case and saw that my flight was canceled. I still have no idea what we learned in theater that day! Panic mode struck but I remained positive. I told Rydberg (just helps to differentiate the two Erin's) and she was not happy about it. I really had no time to brainstorm or discuss because I had phonetics at 5:00pm. I met Caroline in phonetics and we just tried to look up and figure out ways to get to Athens. After class the two Erins met up with us at a computer lab and we all were looking up ways to get to Athens. We looked for ways to get to Italy and Bulgaria but nothing was really working. We went to our respective homes and met up again at around 8 at Tolbiac with our computers to try and figure stuff out. We booked tickets to Italy twice and they cancelled on us both times. After a little bit of wine, and some toy story shapped macaroni and cheese I was feeling better. I got home and researched a little more on trains before finally giving up and going to bed.

By Saturday I was realizing that I wasn't going to be going to Greece. I started off the day going shopping down St. Michele. Then after some critizing from my host mom how Americans always spend their money and don't go to museums I took her advice. I went to the Musse D'Olangerie. It was breathtaking. They have Monet's paintings of his gardens from head to toe in a circular room and it is just beautiful. I actually learned today (I'll get to how later) that the building used to be where oranges were grown, hense the name. After the museum I met up with Erin, Erin, and Caroline at the Chatelet Mall. True this is a metro stop but it is also a giagantic mall as well. We grabbed some MacDo for lunch and then shopped a little bit, didn't find anything good. At 5:00 we headed to Student Bar for happy hour. After that we went our seperate ways to relax a little and then met up again at Tolbiac at around 9:00. We hung out and then met up with some other people in our program at a bar called Temple. Which is litterally two streets away from new host family. It really couldn't be any more convienent. I found out the next day that Julie and Amanda were on a bar crawl and were at the same bar we were at around the same time. How random! We had a really fun night and I left the bar on the earlier side and walked home. It was so nice not having to worry about a cab, or the metro's closing. Good thing this is a very fun bar of choice, perfect location.

Sunday morning I woke up and headed over to meet Julie at the Bastille Market. I introduced her to the market and we walked around and I got some cheese, dried strawberrys and a blueberry muffin. Not a bad breakfast. We then headed over to the Marais for some L'as du Falafel for Julie. Then we walked around on a mad search for watchs but everything was closed, hate sundays. I went back to Julie and Amanda's for a little while and then walked over to Saint Michele. While it was great having the bar so close to me, I live pretty far away from Julie and Amanda now. Definietly not the 10 minute walk I had grown used to. Once I got to St Michele I met up with Caroline and Erin and we were going to get Chinese food-but of couse, it was Sunday. The only thing opened was a Subway so I had a grilled cheese. The sandwhich maker looked at me like I was nuts. No surprise there. Then the three of us headed over to the Odeon movie theaters and went to go see the movie "Remember Me." We knew nothing about it going in but, oh boy was it depressing. We figured it would be just a romance, and Robert Patterson isn't too bad to look at for a while. Well we all almost left in tears. I walked home from there and then just went to bed.

Today was werid. It was so nice not having any class but it was werid because I felt like I needed to be in class, or not in Paris. There's the association between Paris and school. I met Julie at 11:00am to go the NewEurope walking tour of Paris. This is the same tour we did in Berlin. It was really fun going to all these places I had been to already, but never actually hearing the stories and history behind all the monuments. Here are some of the fun things I learned. Whenever there is a statue of a hores with a person on it, the stance of the horse depicts how the person died. If the horse has one hoof in the air the person was murdered, both hoofs the person died in war, and standing on all hoofs means the person died of natural causes. I also learned that the Eiffel Tower was only suppose to be around for 20 some years. It was entrance to the World's Fair when it was in Paris. The Parisseans hated the design. Crazy that is could last that long and now people love it. Our tour guide also said that 7-8 people a day are proposed to on the top of the Eiffel Tower. She said she was curious to see how many people actually said no, but only once they were back safetly on the ground haha-our tour guide was very quirky! Another fun fact was that Waldo, from the Where's Waldo book is called Charlie in Paris. We also walked across a bridge- for all you Sex and the City fans it was the bridge where something happened- I really have no idea I don't watch the show. But the cool thing about the bridge was that there are padlocks all over it with peoples initials. People lock them on the bridge and through the key in the water to show their eternal love with another person. Oh Paris the city of love. We also walked by a hotel. This hotel cost's about $10,000 a night to stay in. You can stay there for free for three nights if you win the Tour de France. I thought that was pretty funny. Some other sights we saw but I just can't rememeber the stories behind them were Notre Dame, Jardin de Tulieries, the Louvre, the petit and grand palace (which aren't actually palaces they were just built for exposse's during the World Fair. One of the expose was a human zoo, kind of odd?). Just remembered another story. We went to a bridge called Pont Neuf. Around the bridge there are weird faces. We learned that Henry IV through a part once and he ran out of champaigne to serve the guests. He started serving them red wine, and we all know how bad mixing drinks is. Everyone got very drunk at the party and Henry IV was so amused by it he grabbed some artists off the streets to paint pictures of his druken frineds- this was their version of photography. The next morning he was looking at all the pictures and laughing at them. To remember these pictures he had sculptures of all these pictures put around the bridge. Pretty funny!

That's really all the interesting things I have right now. Hopefully something crazy will be happening later and I'll be able to tell many more good stories. I hope everyone is having a great time at home not affected by the Volcano, and everyone who is stranded makes it home safe soon!

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