I See London, I See France!

Bonjour from Paris! On Tuesday, our study abroad group left for Paris for a couple of days. It was amazing! Except we had to wake up at three in the morning in order to get on the chunnel. Most people slept on the two hour chunnel ride, but I couldn't do it. The view was too beautiful, especially when we were in Paris. Once we got into Paris, we checked into our hotels, which I expected to be dirty and small, but it was surprisingly nice.

Here is a picture of our hotel room. It was pretty big… and green haha.

After we checked into the hotel, our group went over to the church institute building so we could meet up with the girls in the Paris study abroad. We had to ride the metro (which is the equivalent of London's underground tube) and it was so gross! Don't worry I didn't take a picture of it. It was full of graffiti and filth and it smelled horrible. But luckily, we didn't have to be on it long.

Once we got to the institute building, we met up with a couple Paris study abroad girls that said they would show us around Paris to any place we wanted to go. So of course, we all wanted to check out the food. We started walking around and passed a patisserie (a pastry shop in case that wasn't obvious) and we all got different pastries. I tried some sort of chocolate croissant thing which was incredibly delicious.

One of the most delicious things on earth

This is just a picture of a street we walked down

As we were all walking to the institute building, we passed some interesting and cool museums. I can't remember what they were called, but here is a picture of the outside of them.

A few of us decided to go see the Arc de Triomphe. It has some of the most congested traffic in the world so yeah, it was pretty crowded. But it was so beautiful

 It was kind of under construction so that is why there is that weird thing on the upper right corner of it.

 This is a picture underneath the arc.

After getting a couple of pictures with the arc, we bravely ran for our lives crossing the street and headed down a famous street (I don't remember what it was called) that had lots of shops and restaurants.

 This is a five story Louis Vuitton store.

We then made our way down to a famous macaroon place called Laduree. It was so fun! They had so many fun flavors and colors of macaroons.

 These are some other desserts they had that looked amazing. The strawberry one looked the coolest to me.

These were the macaroons I picked. I got salted caramel, strawberry candy, and german chocolate coconut. The chocolate one was my favorite by far.

This is me in front of Laduree.

The Paris study abroad gave us some advice when we met with them in the institute building, and he said the french will respect you more if you start every conversation with "Bonjour."It is so much a part of their culture to say it before they talk. So, when I ordered, I tried to be fancy and order in french (that's sad that the only french I remember from two years of french in high school is how to order food) so I ordered in french and you can just see the workers trying not to laugh at how bad all of us were at speaking french. I don't know how the french have such a bad reputation for being rude. They are the nicest people ever. I would say the Londoners are the snobby ones and the French are the friendly ones.

When we were done talking about how amazing our macaroons were, we went to see Notre Dame. The inside was amazing. It was one of my favorite places we went. We walked inside, and I literally started breathing heavily because I was so overwhelmed by how full of history and amazing it was.

When we were done, we went and tried to find a cheap place to eat. Some people were too tired to look around, so we settled on eating at McDonalds haha. It wasn't my first choice, but I got to have french fries in France haha.