Blogging
From Abroad

France is by far my favorite country and I was thrilled to get the chance to go back this past weekend. I fell in love with Paris last summer and there has not been a day since that I haven’t planned on moving there when I graduate. So, in summary… my friend Carly and I used our free weekend to head to Paris last Friday.

Arriving in Paris was a little bumpy, but at least successful. Our gates changed in Zurich and we sprinted across the airport to catch our plane. On the plane I was luckily by this completely charming Swiss couple who offered to share a taxi with us and ended up picking up the whole tab! We found our hotel quickly and albeit being small, it was clean and really close to the Arc de Triumphe and Champs-Elyees, so we checked that out when we got in around 11 o’clock. We walked up and down the Champs-Elyees and around the Arc de Triumphe until about 1 then headed back to bed. We also saw an ad for the new 3G iPhone, and of course I had to stop and take a photo. Isn’t it great how the convo is in French? (Much like my friend Leah and I try to do sometimes!)

In the morning we woke up and I had REAL COFFEE (and by real coffee I mean coffee with cream) for the first time in almost a month, as well as pulpy orange juice (my favorite) and the most delicious crossiant of my life. It didn’t even look like a crossiant. Anyway, my French was still holding up pretty well by this point so I was pretty proud of myself. (“Je prende un crossiant et un cafe creme!”) I found this weekend I could understand people talking pretty decently and typically always read most things, but I freeze when it comes to talking to people.

After breakfast, we walked through the unusually cold Parisian streets to go to the top of the Effiel Tower. After seeing how terribly long the line for the elevator was, we decided to climb all 700 stairs to get to the top.

Afterwards we hit the D’Orsy, Paris’s second most famous museum (after the Louvre). I had never been before and it was really great. There were a lot of French painters (mostly French) like Renoir, Monet, Gaugain, Manet, Degas, etc.. I had seen an Impressionist exhibition the week before so it was cool to see some more (especially because Gaugain is my favorite artist, even more than Ver Meer). We walked along the Seine to the Louvre and took pictures in the gardens and around the Pyramid.

We then went to Montmarte, which is home of the Sacred Couer, this beautiful old church on top of a hill. Getting there involves a lot of steps and we wandered around a little bit until some kind of drunk French artist told us to try this restaurant. It was pretty affordable (and we planned on splurging on real food anyway) and we had great service as they gave us 6 free escargot (my favorite)! We had steak (my first red meat in almost a month) and came back and went to sleep.

Versailles, the palace Louis XIV built outside of Paris, is by far my absolute FAVORITE place on the entire Earth. I think I was Marie Antoinette in a prior life, I love it so much. We waited in line forever (note: by Museum Pass just to get out of Versailles line) and were vaguely trampled by 234567890 different groups. Last year it was crowded, but not bad. We walked around the palace and through the gardens to the Petite Trianon and then came back into Paris because we had a flight to catch.

There were train problems getting to the airport, however, and we missed our flight. Swiss Air is completely unhelpful (although still by far European airlines beat American airlines by 34576457%) and we had to REBUY tickets for the next flight… TOMORROW (today). Instead of paying for train/taxi and a hotel and chancing missing our flight again, we decided to bunk down in the airport, which may have been in my top 20 worst ideas ever.

Charles deGaulle is not only completely terribly set up (we may have caught our flight if it hadn’t been so insanely and crazily laid out… any reason Check-In Desks are 3 miles away from a train station??) but is completely freezing. I slept with a scarf and a dress as a blanket and was still shivering. I could not find a place to sleep comfortable because there were arm rests all over the place. We saw homeless men digging through the garbage looking for food. French soilders with machine guns were patrolling the terminal (but that is nothing new for me to see… it is like that at most major train stations and attractions in France). About 3 AM we made like nomads to find warmer ground or a store open selling a blanket (nope), we did find chairs downstairs in a warmer area we could push together to have two seats without an armrest. This terminal was the Asian terminal, however, so we were woken up as people from Eastern flights came in all through the night at the baggage claim.

We did not get much sleep and woke up at 530 AM for our 7 AM flight and almost missed it again because check-in lines were ridiculous. There is no reason to have 2 desks open for a flight of over 100 people. At Zurich the same thing almost happened as we had to cry our way onto our flight. Our trip was good however, which we realized by the time we got into Milan and we went straight to class with all our luggage and the clothes we slept in. During lunch we showered and I took a quick run to get all my nervous energy out.

I have had about 3 hours of sleep (non-consecutively) in the past day in a frigid airport and have some work for class to do, so I am going to end this here. The moral of the story is: don’t depend on public transport, take a taxi to the airport. Also pack warm because Paris is uncommonly cold for this time of year and you never know when you have to use a dress for a blanket. I am back in Milan and safe and sound and am ever so happy for this tiny twin sized bed.