Ohhh Paris!!!!

Last weekend was our long free weekend. After classes on Thursday morning, we were free until Monday afternoon at 4:30. The group of Bellarmine girls had decided to go to Paris. We had a lot of fun.

Our flight was out of Madrid at 5:45 a.m....ewww. So we had planned on taking the last bus out of Segovia to Madrid, maybe hanging out in Madrid and then catching the last metro to the airport.

We took the last bus out of Segovia, which was around 9:30 p.m. Lopez was headed to Madrid too for a few days. When we got to Madrid, we didn´t really know what we were going to do. Lopez was our savior and let us put all of our bags in his room while we went out for a while. The original plan was to take the Metro to the airport but we decided to hanging out in the city a little longer would be more fun than sitting in the airport. So we opted for a taxi.

For some tapas, we headed to La Taurina again. We had some sangria and more bull tail, a tomato salad and we tried octupus and squid dishes...mmmm. Sofian, the waiter from last time (he told me I wasn´t as pretty as Ashley) was excited to see us (especially Ashley).

After we ate, we went to this latin dance club and danced for a little while. It was a lot of fun...everyone danced a little. After that we kind of just wandered around and went in a couple of other bars...but they were boring.

So we headed to the airport. While we were in line to check in, this really cute boy got in line behind us. He started talking to all of us and kind of stuck with us for the rest of our flight and busride to Paris. His name was Ignacio and he was from Spain. We were sad to later find out that he was going to Paris to visit his girlfriend, but he was very nice and enjoyed talking with us.

When the plane landed, we found out we had an hour busride we had to take to get to the city. We weren´t expecting that, but it was no big deal. Around 10 a.m., we were finally in Paris!!! It took us all a little while to figure out where we needed to go, but we did it and hopped on the Metro. MacKenzie and I headed to our hotel. It was about a 15 minute walk from the Louvre and it worked out great for the weekend.

Later we met the other girls and got some lunch at a cute little cafe. We had croque madames...which we decided were our favorite dish from Paris. We decided to spend to spend the rest of the day at the Louvre. It is so much bigger than imagined....I think it could take months to go through the whole thing! So we were a little overwhelmed and very tired, but we just kept going, because we had to see the Louvre! We saw the Mona Lisa, of course, and Hammurabi´s code, and then just kind of wandered around some of the Roman and Greek sculpture areas and renaissance paintings. By the end of the day we were exhausted, and we made it an early night. We had a big day planned in the morning...there were so many things we wanted to see.

Saturday morning, we met to plan our day. We started off at Notre Dame. We walked by the Seine to get there and it was so cool. It was amazing to see the thing that our cathedral in Covington is modeled after. I lit a prayer candle in the chapel of St. Joseph. For lunch we walked through the Latin Quarter and sat in the Luxemburg Gardens to eat some sandwiches. It was a beautiful sunny day and the gardens were gorgeous.

After that we headed over to the Musee d´Orsay, and saw some really great paintings. It was all of my favorites like, Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Renoir and Degas. We also found this Cézanne painting that looks exactly like López...it was hilarious...but also kind of eery how much it looks like him.

For the rest of the afternoon we headed over to the Eiffel Tower. We decided not to go up, some of the other girls wanted to wait until nighttime to go up...so we went the next night. But we got some ice cream and laid out on the grass beneath the Eiffel Tower (how many times can you say you´ve done that?!?). Then we were taking some pictures for the Bellarmine brochure and we decided to make a pyramid...well these two French guys wearing fake NFL jerseys came up to us and asked us a question. They wandered if they could take their picture with us since we were "almost cheerleaders." We were laughing so hard, we almost couldn´t respond, but we finally agreed, and the picture is priceless!

This is a good stopping point for me....I´m running out of time, but I want you all to stay updated...don´t worry I´ll have more soon. I have a tough final exam tomorrow, but I´ll try to finish up Paris and another post about this past week tomorrow (Tuesday). Thanks for reading everyone! Hope you are enjoying it!