So! It was definitely a big mistake to wait an entire week after we got home to post this blog, but I will try to piece everything together by memory, and hopefully it will almost be the truth. Ok so what first…? Ahh yes, thank you Jennifer. We got into Paris on a Monday, which is significant because on Tuesday, otherwise known as, the last day we would be there, the Louvre is closed. Other museums are closed on Mondays of course, but the Louvre and Mona Lisa are obviously way too fancy pants to follow suit.
So anyway, the only way we would get the chance to pay 9 euro to walk through the entire museum to get to the Mona Lisa and stare at it from a distance for 5 minutes and then leave… was for Aaron to drive as fast as possible from Lucerne (meaning the speed limit) and avoid enough traffic to get us into downtown Paris before they closed. Well according to the picture right before your eyes (and the description at the beginning of this paragraph), we made it! Of course it’s cool to say that you saw the Mona Lisa, but the closest you can get to it is like 15 feet, and it’s behind several inches of glass because apparently some crazy tried to destroy it a couple years ago. There really are a lot of other interesting displays in the museum, but we didn’t stick around to learn about them, because the Louvre is a pretty touristy location, and there WERE some terrorist alerts being thrown around, so we got back to the bus with plenty of time to spare. I did get a super sweet green army shirt out of the deal though… I wear it all the time. Jennifer “loves” the site of it by now… or maybe some other word.
Speaking of terrorist alerts, there really wasn’t much going on the whole time we were in Paris. Which, it’s not like you’re just going to see terrorists running around trying to bomb something but being foiled at the last second, so if there IS something going on, you’re not going to know about it… but there really didn’t seem to be any extra security out and about. A couple times we saw French soldiers walking around, some of them armed, in the crowded areas. I don’t mean like a squadron of soldiers though, I mean like 3 dudes, just walking along looking at people. We felt safe.
After the Louvre we headed to the hotel to unload everything, and get ready for dinner, which consisted of two or three courses of tomatoes. Not really, but the first dish was a tomato salad. Tomato and cheese salad. The surprising part, was that I ate it! All of it. It was actually pretty awesome, and I never eat tomatoes if they aren’t on a margherita pizza, or in the form of sauce. Anyway, after dinner we jumped on the bus and went back into town, and I think a few people took a canal cruise, but clearly we did not, or I would know for sure. The rest of us that didn’t go on the cruise all went over to the Eiffel Tower, and first things first… opened up a couple bottles of champagne to celebrate Dave’s birthday! Speaking of which… it was Dave’s birthday! We had a much bigger tribute to Dave later, but for now we went up the tower, which was much bigger than I expected it to be in person! It makes sense, because for a long time it was the tallest structure in the world. Way back when… in the olden days. SO, it was an awesome night and not very crowded in my expert opinion, and seeing Paris at night from the top of the Eiffel Tower was even more awesome than during the day. Speaking of which, Paris was one of the coolest looking cities on the entire tour, if not the coolest. I say “coolest looking”, because I don’t say things like “beautiful”, so feel free to substitute whatever you’re comfortable with. Anyway, sometime during the 1800′s, or maybe some other century entirely, Paris was completely remodeled by the king at the time, Napolean III… ? Possibly. Anyway he was very competitive with the other major cities in Europe and wanted everything to be bigger and better and then it was so. They tore down thousands of buildings and rebuilt them and Paris apparently changed entirely during this time.
Enough history lessons from me… I’m just rephrasing whatever I can remember Urban telling us, and probably incorrectly. So when we got down from the Eiffel tower, we dodged a few dozen illegal souvineer/light slingshot… thing… vendors, and a big group of us hopped on the RER (It was like an underground bus system on tracks… or maybe a regular subway system… with rubber wheels? On tracks.) and headed for the Latin Quarter, which was where it was apparently cheaper to go out. More specifically, for Canadian Dave’s birthday, we went to The Great Canadian Pub! When we got there we pretty much took over the bar, drank Moosehead and sang some national anthems… Dave said that it was his best birthday ever, but he probably uses that line with all the ladies. THEN, it was midnight so we cast Dave aside and began celebrating Jess’s birthday! So Happy Birthday Jess, and Congratulations! (At the Eiffel Tower, Jess and Dillon got engaged, so there was plenty to celebrate.)
Wow… am I really writing about day ONE of Paris? Time to wrap it up… especially since that’s what we actually did at this point… One angry cab driver later, and we somehow arrived back at our hotel, and called it a night.
The next day, which was our first full day in a city since Rome, we got up and headed to a… perfumeria? They talked about making perfume or something, but a few of us left a little early to make our way back to the Eiffel Tower to try to meet Tom, who had pulled an all-nighter the night before, or something, and wasn’t ready when the bus left. Well apparently he wasn’t ready after that either because he never showed up at the Eiffel Tower! So after waiting for a bit, we headed off to see some sites. First we went to Notre Dame, which is way bigger once you’re inside than it looks like on the outside. OH, one random immature highlight of my trip, was when we walked up behind the Twins and the Marianne inside of the Notre Dame… and I reached down and jiggled twin Marianne’s purse around to simulate a not so stealthly pick-pocket, and it’s not like she really freaked out or anything… but she totally freaked out! On the inside… I could tell. Plus she said so.
Otherwise, I’m having trouble remembering where else we went, but we definitely shopped for quite a while on the Rue de Rivoli, Jennifer and I ventured off at one point and witnessed a drug deal going down in a shady alley, then we stopped for lunch and had some fairly expensive burgers. After that it was getting a little late so we headed to the Arc de Triomphe, which is surrounded by the world’s biggest roundabout. I ran back and forth across it a few times just to say that I did, and then we decided to head back to the hotel. Also the first part of the last sentence isn’t true, I would never do something Urban told me not to do.
When we got to the hotel I took a nap and then we got ready to go to the big Cabaret show and dinner that everyone had been looking forward to for at least a week. Now… I’m willing to admit this, even if only because Keri and Shanna admitted it first right in front of me… but I actually thought we were going to the Moulin Rouge when the bus dropped us off… right in front of the Moulin Rouge. However, we immediately turned and starting walking away from it, but don’t worry, the show we went to was completely awesome! The cabaret show itself was really good, but the other acts in between were amazing. One was a juggling act with a couple of guys, that was already entertaining but they were really good, and then there was a professional acrobat, that neither appeared to be professional, or remotely acrobatic. Well it turns out, he still wasn’t very professional, but he was ridiculously good! Tim from our group was invited on stage to help him out, which was a lot of fun, and as far as I remember the food was pretty good as well.
So for our last night out, we took a short walk down to the Australian pub, and spent the rest of the night hanging out with our new friends for the last time. It was a blast but it eventually turned sad when we had to call it a night. So we said our goodbyes to everyone we could find, some people more than once, and then left to catch a cab. Well, apparently the Holiday Inn: Garden Court is the best kept secret in all of Paris, because we never met a cab driver who had heard of it. So without an actual address to give the driver, we had to walk BACK to the Australian pub, and get the address from Leah, and say even more sad goodbyes, and then go argue with another cab driver about whether or not the address was right. Luckily it was, so we got back and went to bad as fast as possible.
However… the next morning around 6:00 a.m. we didn’t wake up until the front desk called to tell us that our cab driver was downstairs waiting to take us to the airport, so we had to jump up and scramble to get ready and leave, which meant no showers before our 10 hour flight back, but luckily Jennifer had packed everything up the previous day, before we left for the cabaret show. So then the cab driver doesn’t know what terminal “Continental Airlines” flies out of, and I try to figure out how to use the internet in the lobby to look it up, but the driver comes back inside and asks again what airline we are flying, so I tell him again and this time he somehow knows exactly what terminal we need! Sketchy, but ok, as long as he can take us in the right direction, we can figure it out. Then two blocks into the ride we get into an argument about the cab fare, because I thought I only had 50 euro left (turns out I had like another 15 in my pockets) and he’s telling us that he won’t take us now, so I kindly informed him that he definitely WILL take us now, which apparently was a good enough argument because he took us, and even to the right terminal! So thanks to our paranoia, we end up sitting at our gate with like 2 and a half hours to spare before our flight takes off, but that’s better than the alternative.
Long story long, we ended up safe at home by that afternoon, just happy to be able to sit still and relax… somewhere other than a bus or plane anyway. So now, like I said, it is a week later, and I probably left some things out, but all in all, we had the time of our lives and met some amazing people. In fact, there has already been talk of a reunion vacation! Anyway, if anyone from our group reads this, we love you guys and are so happy that we got to know you!
Also, tonight halfway through this blog I decided to whip out the random 1 liter glass mug that I had in the freezer and fill it up Oktoberfest style… then we took a picture! Also, interesting fact… two cans of beer completely filled it up! I knew Urban was bad at math… 
