Days 2 & 3 of Eurotrip 2k8...

It’s not very sunny but who I am to complain, hopefully it will get sunnier later. We’ll see. We are doing walking tours today so that we can see as much of Paris as possible and then we are going to check out the Eiffel Tower one more time and after dinner head to the Louvre. Hopefully we will go out tonight as well. Granted – that means pulling an all-night because we have to be at a train station by 6am to take the train to Beauvais airport where we will catch our plane to Barcelona.
We headed out by 10:30 so that we could meet at St. Michel by 11:30 where there were free walking tours, with time to stop for a crepe on the way. Butter & Sugar Crepes for breakfast? Delectable. Our tour guide, Luke, was fantastic and extremely knowledgeable. We walked for at least 4 hours with the tour but it was a great time. I learned so many things. For instance – if there is a statue of a king (or great person) on a horse and all four legs are down, he/she died a peaceful death, but it the left front leg is up they died a bloody death and if the horse is rearing up on its hind legs, they died in battle. It was really cool. We saw Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur, the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, and a bajillion other really important historical buildings. In the middle of the tour we stopped for lunch where we all got sandwiches, a drink, and a dessert. It was so delicious. My dessert was this little pie looking thing and I thought that it was filled with some chocolate crème or something – like a mini chocolate crème pie. However, I was mistaken – the filling was pure chocolate. It was really good, but I had to pour out half of the chocolate, it was just waaaay too much chocolate for me. That says a lot because I love chocolate. We ended our tour between the Petite Palais and the Grand Palais and he told us some amazing stories about World War II. In all of Paris – when Hitler took over he wanted nothing more than to see Napoleon’s grave. However in order to look into Napoleon’s grace you must bend over a railing almost as if you were bowing to him and Hitler refused to bow to another emperor so he had them set up a mirror so that he could walk in, look at the mirror and see the grave. However, when he got to the top and looked across – they had set the mirror up wrong. So Hitler spun around quickly to leave and his hat fell off, so he turned around and knelt down to pick it up thereby bowing in front of the tomb of Napoleon. Also - did you know Paris was supposed to be flattened? A famous officer was order by Hitler to completely level it because as the allies closed in on Hitler he states that if he couldn’t have Paris – nobody could. He was there for a month, but he was in contact with someone who was in contact with the allies and the Nazis. He came out with an elaborate plan and in the end set up only one detonator – in the Grand Palais which is a large open building with a flat marble floor. When Hitler called to ensure that he was flattening the city he set off that one detonator, it did little damage to the building, only breaking the glass ceiling and making a mark in the floor – all of which was easily repaired. He said that he just couldn’t flatten all of Paris because of its beauty and history. Thank God for that man. Now we can visit beautiful Paris. The city is so beautiful I loved it.
We headed to the Louvre after and saw the Mona Lisa, and the Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory and Napoleon III’s quarters – where he lived while he was king. It was amazing. We took so many pictures.
But after 9 hours of walking around we were exhausted. We wandered our way back to the apartment and all of us collapsed face down onto the bed for a few hours. Eventually we decided to go out to eat because we needed some food. We found a really cute little restaurant where I got (French) onion soup, which the waitress continually said was “really really French.” I’m not sure what that meant but it was good none the less and then we ordered dessert. I figured it would be the right place to order crème brulee, so I did and it was delicious. But it was too much and I could only eat half of it. Genna & Lizzy got omelettes and chocolate mousse. The chocolate mousse was really thick, and almost frosting-like. But in all it was a fantastic day in Paris.
We had to be up by 4:45 in order to catch a cab to the bus station to catch the bus at 6am to the Beauvais Airport. Our flight to Girona (near Barcelona) was at 9am. We made it into Spain 15 minutes early and found our way to a bus which took us about an hour to get to Barcelona. From there we took a cab to Lizzy’s friend Allie’s apartment and set up camp. Luckily there is free wifi access here so I can type up all this and add pictures! I’ll do my best to keep staying in touch. Now I’m going to go take a nap since I didn’t actually get to sleep until 3am. Do the math – that’s less than 2 hours of sleep.