Paris

So you may or may not know (probably do) that I recently went to Paris. Crazy, huh? It came about when a couple months ago I felt in a bit of a rut and wanted to do something new. I'm done with school (for now) and have just been working. Talk about boring. Anyway, I thought, "Hey, I've always wanted to travel, why not plan a trip?". So I started looking into different places to travel including Paris, Italy, Germany, London, Dublin, etc. I was looking at plane tickets and hotels. I figured I'd probably go in March sometime that way I could have plenty of time to plan, get my ticket, and save more money. Well, when I went to work I told my coworkers Lindsey and Megan that I was planning a trip to Europe somewhere. They seemed to think that was cool and wanted to do it with me. Being 3 of 4 people working at the Dr.'s office though we couldn't all take off work at the same time while we were seeing patients. So, after we decided that Paris was where we wanted to go we decided to do it the last week of October. The Dr. was going to be out of the office that week anyway. It was like the first week of September while we were deciding this. So the first thing we did was buy the Paris Pass, which gave us free range over the metro, buses, and the RER within central Paris. It also gave us access to pretty much every museum and places of interest we wanted to go to. Then we got our passports taken care of, our plane tickets, and the hotel. Needless to say it was a lot of work trying to get everything planned with just 6 weeks to do so. But then the time came and we went.

We left on Oct. 23 (Fri.) and came back Oct. 31 (Sat.). So we spent time in Paris for 6 full days. We didn't get into Paris until the late morning of the 24th. It was a looong flight- about 10 1/2 hours. It was mostly dark during the whole flight there. So we took a taxi to our hotel and then headed out to check out Paris. It was raining, we were tired, and it took forever to find the double decker bus we were looking for. The bus was a waste of money but whatever. Needless to say our first day there wasn't that pleasant. But we did get some cool pics by the Eiffel Tower.

Sunday morning Lindsey and I tried to go to a sacrament meeting. We had directions and the address but it took longer to get there than we planned for. We found the street it was on and could tell it would still be a long walk to get there and we probably missed sacrament anyway so we left. Oh well, you get points for trying, right? Anyway, that day we went and saw Notre Dame, which was totally awesome. We heard the bells too. We went down into the crypts there too and saw old pre-Roman building remains. We went into Notre Dame to see the cathedral. There was actually mass going on too. Weird. It was a beautiful building though. Then we went out to get in line to be able to climb to the top. While we were in line there was this guy wearing a creepy old man mask going around freaking people out. He was an entertainer of some sort. He would just go up to people when they weren't looking at put his arm around them or pop his head right in front of them and get them to freak and scream. He would just go up and down the street doing that. It kept us entertained for a good half hour. But then we got in and climbed over 400 spiral stairs to the top of Notre Dame. Amazing view. We also went to Saint Chapelle. Pretty cool cathedral with amazing stained glass. The upstairs had a whole long wall that was just stained glass. Later that night we also went to the Arc de Triomphe to see it lit up at night. There were a good 300 stairs there. We also saw the tomb of the unknown soldier lit up. Cool stuff.


Notre Dame

The next couple days kinda blend in... At some point we went and saw the Rodin museum where the Thinking Man statue is. The gardens there were absolutely beautiful. I love gardens and landscape stuff. Right after Rodin we went over to Napoleon's tomb. Also cool. His tomb was freaking huge. There were others of his family buried there too. We also went to the Tomb of the Kings. We saw there Marie Antoinette, King Louis XVI and Louis XVII's heart. Yeah, his heart is in this vase thing. But you can't really get anywhere near it. Coming back from the tomb though we had an interesting event occur on the metro. Firstly, apparently that area up north is not a good area and we probably shouldn't have gone. Anyway, on the metro on the way back to our area we witnessed a mugging. There was this young black guy standing next to me on the metro and there was another lady by us. When the metro stopped and the doors opened the guy grabbed this lady's purse and pulled her off the metro. The doors were still open and people were trying to get off and there were these kids crying out for their mom who it looked like had gotten caught in the crossfire so to speak and got pushed off and was on the ground. The one lady wouldn't let go of her purse and was trying to punch him in the face. He just had this weird grin on his face. Then this other dude came around and just put him in a choke hold and pinned him to the ground. The lady went over and kicked him in the face. He somehow got up and tried to run but then got tackled again and pinned to wait for the police to come get him. Then the doors finally closed and we continued on our way. We got off and were by Notre Dame and decided to sit down on the benches and say a little prayer. We had all been a little shaken by that and were just grateful it didn't happen to one of us. As soon as we finished we felt a wave of relief come. We ate our little lunch and got up to continue to where we were going. We hadn't even taken 10 steps when we saw 2 LDS missionaries walk by. We stopped them to say hi and one of them was there on his first day and he was from Salt Lake. Crazy! The other one was from southern France and spoke good English. We just chatted for a couple minutes then went on our way. It's hard to explain how cool that was to see them. I seriously feel that Heavenly Father put them in our way just to reassure us that He was watching out for us and that He would always be there. There's just too much there for me to think that could've just been coincidence.
Anway, on with the trip. We also saw the Conciergerie where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned before she was guillotined. Cool stuff. We also got to go to the Grevin Wax Museum. Pretty awesome stuff. They were pretty life-like figures. We saw Arnold Schwartzenager, Elton John, Michael Jackson (he was creepy...), Jackie Chan, Indian Jones, and Elvis. We also went to Hard Rock Cafe in Paris. Good ole American food and music! One of the waiters there came and chatted with us for a little talking about America and his couple trips there and what not. He called us his American sisters. He was one of the nice Frenchies.



Wednesday we went to the Place de la Concorde, which was just the open square where Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were guillotined. Pretty cool stuff. They didn't have an actual marker though on where it happend. But we were there. Then we went and saw the Opera Garnier, the grand opera house. That's where the phantom did his original haunting. It was such an amazing building. Garnier, the designer, had some good taste. Chandeliers, marble stairs, golden trimmed balconies, you name it. That afternoon we went to the Louvre. It had crazy organization. We just walked wherever. We saw a bunch of Roman/Greek statues, Renaissance paintings, and what not. We saw the most famous stuff like Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, and Nike the winged victory statue, which was probably my favorite. I already heard the Mona Lisa would be disappointing and so I was prepared for that. It's like a tiny 8x11 framed picture and I think you couldn't get any closer than like 15 feet and there were a million people all around. It was a pretty exhausting day. Opera Garnier


Winged Victory

So, Thursday we went to the Aquarium. Fish are cool. There wasn't really anything there I hadn't seen before. Still cool, but nothing new. We did some souvenir shopping and then went to the Eiffel Tower later in the afternoon. We got through the long line while listening to Rascal Flatts on Lindsey's phone. All American music. We took the elevator to the very top. It was a long elevator ride. It was going pretty fast and it still took a few minutes to get there. There was a cool view. It's a 360 area and we found the spot with the little American flag to show which direction the US was. On our way back down they had lit up the Eiffel Tower for the night. It was cool. Once we were off and headed back to our hotel they started shooting fireworks of some kind or something. We turn back to look and there are these white lights flashing all around the tower. It looked like white fireworks going off all around it. It was pretty awesome.

Friday was our last full day and we spent it at Versailles. The castle was amazing. There were like a million rooms and long halls with statues on both sides. We saw the Hall of Mirrors, which had chandeliers all down the hall and then mirrors on the one side making it look like twice the amount of gold and chandeliers. It was pretty awesome. Then we went outside, saw the gardens and took a little tram around to see more of the grounds and to visit Marie Antoinette's Estate. Her estate was huge. It had ponds, trees everywhere, pathways going every which way and a little closed up like gazebo which was used to play music there. It was frickin' freazing, but still amazing. I loved it because like I said I like gardens and grounds with trees and ponds and what not.

So Saturday morning we got up early, went to the airport, and flew home. We were all ready to get back to America. Paris was cool and all and it was a great experience, but God Bless America. I was so happy and pround to land in the US and see the flag waving. So there you have it. My Parisian experience.