Joyeux Noel! Christmas in Paris!

We found this tower

   I don't even know where to begin. This has been the best vacation of my life! Reggie and I started our adventure sleeping 6 hours in the Madrid airport, but finally made it to Paris to spend 8 days in the most beautiful city I have ever been to. We walked the center of the city up and down, right to left. Thanks to my amazing father, we spent the week staying at the Marriott hotel on the Champs- Elysess. From our balcony we had a view of the Eiffel tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and The Notre Dame in the distance. It was out of this world!

Our mission everyday was to see and do as much as we could without spending any money. In a city like Paris, it is absolutely impossible. But I think we did pretty well. Instead of going out for drinks on Christmas night, we bought a few bottles of wine and sat under the Eiffel Tower with two friends until all the wine was finished. It was a beautiful night, followed by a nice long sleep in and more walking around the city. We had a chance to see where both Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde have been buried and spent time in the parks on the outside of the city.
  One of the days we made our way to Versailles. Little did we know, Tuesdays are the WORST days to go to Versailles. The palace is closed on Mondays, and Le Louvre is closed on Tuesdays, making it so all the tourists go to Versailles on Tuesdays. woops! The line was made up of a couple thousand people and it would take over two hours to get in to the palace!

Enjoying the Complimentary hotel items :)

Thank goodness for Reggie's stealth-like ninja skills. He had a plan.... He began to snap a few photos of me in front of the palace gates (which is also where the entrance was) and slowly, looking at the camera at the pictures we took, slid into a large group of Asians! Nobody said anything and we were in the palace within 45 seconds! I felt so guilty after the fact, I was ready to go back out and wait in the line. But as we spent more time in the palace, I was getting cut off and cut in line by everyone. By families, young children, old women, everyone. With every person that cut in front of me I felt better and better.
 
We also had every intention to walk up the stairs into the Eiffel Tower, but we had no idea what to think when we showed up one of our last mornings in Paris to find the entire area was formed into a long long line of people waiting to walk up the stairs of the tower. The other kiosks were not working, so all the people had formed a line that was about a mile long, curling up and down the paved area under the tower. We immediately nixed our plan and decided to check out a few museums instead. We saw the Thinker statue and much more famous works.
  

In front of Napolean's Les Invalides

Its funny when you're a child reading books about art and sculptures, there are always a handful of paintings that are in every single book. One of them being the Mona Lisa. Now if anyone wants to see a beautiful photo of the Mona Lisa, it's easy enough to go online, look for a photo of this painting, no problems. So why in the world would anyone want to take a picture of a picture? I was more interested in taking a picture in the absolute craziness that surrounded the Mona Lisa. When I tried to get close to snap a photo, I was pretty much taken out by a small Asian grandfather! The crowd surrounding the painting was unreal! I am so thankful for the time i was able to spend in Le Louvre. It is such an overwhelming museum of art. I think we could have sent all our days in Paris in that museum!
  

Notre Dame on Christmas!

We were lucky enough to make it into the Notre Dame on Christmas Day for a typical mass, with a lot of singing. (In French!) We also took a boat ride down the Seine to view all the sites from the river. It was a coooold night, but so beautiful with all the Christmas lights lighting up the city.
    Paris was the best, but it was so difficult not being able to communicate with everyone. Granted, most of the people in Paris can speak enough English for us to get by, but I would still love to go back to France and at least know how to say, "you're welcome, or what time is it?" For this reason, I was pretty excited to get back to Madrid for New Years!