Saturday: Much less exciting than Friday. But still pretty awesome.
I've seen a lot of Paris, but most of it was from a tour bus in high school. Figured I'd take a 3.5 hour walking tour of the city. It's free, but the tour guides work for tips. I thought it would be a good way to see things and explore the city more. A tour group left my hostel at 10am. What they neglected to say was that that group would be meeting up with the larger tour group where the tour was actually scheduled to start at 11. So after waiting forever in a metro station while the girl helped everyone buy metro tickets, we got to the Latin Quarter and chilled. (Literally. It was cold out.) By 11:45 we'd only made it to Notre Dame, which was about three blocks away. So I peaced out. I'd have wandered around more if I'd had time to kill, but there were other things I wanted to do. If I go back to Paris again I'll try to schedule a day just for exploring. If.
From there I went to the Louvre. I'd gone in high school but we only had like an hour and a half there? So basically we ran to find the Mona Lisa and one or two other things that people knew they wanted to see, and then we took pictures of the ugly glass pyramid, and then we peaced out. So this time I figured I'd wander around and take my time and look at everything. I think I wound up spending two hours there before I get really bored and peaced out. >_> Whoops. I'm not really an art fan, but I thought I'd be interested. Guess not.
Left the Louvre. Walked past the Musée d'Orsay. Never realized how close all these things were to each other since we didn't really walk anywhere in high school. Realized I could've walked to the Louvre from Notre Dame instead of taking a really long roundabout metro trip, but ah well. Passed the Place de la Concorde. Walked all the way down the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. Stopped for a crèpe along the way. It had Nutella, but the guy was out of bananas. :( He laughed when I said that was sad. Mmm, crèpe. Went up to the top of the Arc as well. Pretty cool view. Probably better at night, but hey.
Found a Starbucks on the Champs-Elysées. Stood in line for like ten minutes. It was crazy. But I got coffee and it was beautiful. Went back to the hostel. Had dinner there. Planned on going to bed ridiculously early because I was getting up at like 5. On a whim, I checked an email account I don't use very often. I'd used it for my Critical Language Scholarship Application, and they said we'd hear the results by late March. Late March. Even though it was the first weekend of March and I didn't think I'd hear from them on a Saturday, I totally did. And nearly had a heart attack in the hostel's internet cafe. I won't know where I'm going til April-ish, because we all have to do language assessments so they can place us appropriately. I could wind up in one of 3 places: Tunis, Cairo, or Amman. Anywhere is fine with me. It's not AUI, so it'll be fine. =D
Went to bed. Woke up at 5. Jumped on the metro at 5:30 to take the train back to the bus station to go to the airport. Travelling is such a hassle sometimes. Stood out in the cold (it was around 25 Farenheit) for an hour because I was so early and you can only get on the bus the corresponds to your flight. Killed time in that airport. Killed 4 hours in Madrid. Was back at AUI by 6-630pm on Sunday. I was in such a good mood, even though I was coming back. I'm still in a good mood most of the time, actually. I guess I really needed to get out of here. And I can't believe it was only a week ago that I was in Paris and saw Roméo et Juliette. Ahhh it was great. Definitely had to be one of the best weekends of my life.
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