Bonjour Paris: Day 1.

It's been a few days since our adventures in Paris, so I promise to do my best in relating the whole of our 3 days there. To begin, I should explain that due to a ticket malfunction, we got split into two groups of two; Alice and Britt left Sunday night at 7:55PM or so, while Cindy and I got to stay until 7:00AM the following morning on Monday. Which was kinda cutting it close, since we had class at 12:00PM that day and we were getting in at 9:30AM. ...But I'll move on to the beginning of our adventure now though, so you'll have to read the whole entry to know if we made it back in time, ha ha ha! ...Or you could just scroll down to the end, but that's cheating. In any case, here it goes-

Friday was a hectic day in itself, because we all have studio from 9:00AM-12:00PM to begin with (and we turned in our first project that day, which we had time to work on until the end of studio so it was a busy day), but then we have different times for Italian. I have class from 1:00 to 3:00, while they have it from 3:00-5:00. So, after studio and grabbing lunch, we went separate ways so that they could go pack up their carry-ons while I went back for class, and then we switched so that I could go back and finish packing, locking up the apartment, grabbing the last minute things they may have forgotten, and all that jazz, while they had class. Then I booked it back to studio, where we decided to meet, so we could get a taxi. Well...we weren't sure how to call one. It's difficult in Italian; none of us are super fluent, so we were kinda scared. But it was about 5:25 or so by this point. So we started trying to figure out how to use the phone in studio. And then our teacher came and saw us, so we asked her for help. And she explained the taxi service to us, but then when we told her where we were going and when our flight was, she told us to go to the cat sanctuary area (more about it is in a previous entry, but yes, there's a cat sanctuary!) since we'd be able to find a taxi much faster and save a bit of money too. Cool. We went there right away, because she was super worried we'd miss our flight. But guess what? Our taxi ride took yes, a little while due to some traffic, but we still had about 40 minutes to hang out in the airport to eat dinner and find our gate. The most trouble we had was finding out where we needed to check in and where security was, since we ended up being dropped off in the wrong building. The right one was next door though, so we were just fine.

When we arrived in Paris, the airport was beautiful! Then again, everyone should know how much I love airports by now, so I do tend to notice these things. I could live in the Logan International airport, which I'm sure is only something a handful of people can say. Anyways, we got there pretty late so we decided a taxi was the fastest way to get to our hotel. And it was. So we got to the hotel, checked in, and had fun in the tiniest elevator of my life. The one to our apartment in Rome is tiny, but this one was probably only 2/3rds of its size, so Cindy and I made a bunch of odd whining sounds on our way up and never took it again. It was actually pretty funny, since a guy had come by asking about the stairs while Alice and Britt were taking it, and we said we weren't sure where they were exactly. Well. He definitely beat us up there, but we did see him turn the corner and look at us a bit funny after we pushed out off the elevator laughing and whining. Whoops.

Anyways, Cindy and I crashed on the bed until Alice and Britt meet us at our room on the third floor so we could to go out and have an adventure, to see the Moulin Rouge! Since you know, we were in the Red Light District. And it was down the street. No big deal.

Hah.

Do you know me?

Because if you do, you know how much that sort of thing makes me super uncomfortable. And walking down this street at around 12:30AM or so, seeing tons of sex shops and peep shows (is there a better word for it?) and a 'discotheque' which was definitely not just a discotheque, made me want to shrink. But getting to the Moulin Rouge itself was very cool; it actually seems like a pretty classy sort of place, compared to the nastiness of many of the places along the street before it. It's super expensive to get in for a meal, which keeps out a good many of the crazies I imagine, and from the pictures on the wall, it could be worse. Much worse. But to show off the building itself, because in my head I imagined an odd combination of Harold Zidler, Satine, and Christian singing random bits from Moulin Rouge! in my head, while Toulouse-Lautrec painted away. I should get a book about Toulouse-Lautrec one day. It will have to go next to my book about Jack the Ripper. What an odd child I am. Regardless, here's a picture:


After that and a little more talking, it was bed time so we could start a brand new day, packed with as much as we could fit!