So, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted, but I put up a few pictures so everyone could see what I’ve been doing. I think I’ll just kinda go thru what we did day by day, starting last Tuesday. This is gonna be a long post too, so be warned, bwahahahaha…
Last Tuesday, we were still in Nice, but we took a bus to Monaco. We walked around Monte Carlo for a while, checked out the stage for the start of le Tour de France, and then headed off to the palace. First we took a tour of a museum that was a personal collection of mostly Napoleonic artifacts that are held by the royal family of Monaco. That was probably one of my favorite things we did in Nice, because we got to see a lot of cool historical objects, like Napoleon’s tripartite hat, a piece of the sleeve of the shirt of King Louis XVI that he wore when he was guillotined, and even hand-written letters from King Louis XIV and Cardinal Richelieu! What a wealth of history! We then took a tour of the palace, which was nice, but after seeing so many chateaux, I more underwhelmed than I probably should have been. Before going back to Nice, we stopped in the Monte Carlo Casino. Like most of Nice, it was just for your typical rich snob types, which I didn’t really enjoy in Monaco, though I really wouldn’t mind being the valet there to drive all there sweet and super FAST cars! I played twenty euros, losing 5 on a slot, but kicking some minor league butt and winning back one on video poker! We headed back to Nice, and tried to go to the beach, but it rained again :(
Wednesday, we got up early and took our train to Paris-5.5 hours! We arrived at one of the several Paris train stations, Gare Lyon, took the Metro to the Louvre stop, and walked a block from the Louvre to our hotel-very convenient! We then proceeded to take a nice walk around the city in search of dinner, and we managed to catch les Jardins Tuilieries, la Place de la Concorde (where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were guillotined), the Champs Elysée, and the Arc de Triomphe. Plenty of pictures, no worries…
Thursday, we took a train to see Versailles, and what can I say but WOW! None of the chateaux I had seen even came close to that! Louis XIV=baller! After touring the palace, we spent a lot of time in the gardens, which were probably bigger than the size of the whole country of Monaco, no joke! After returning to Paris, we met up with the other group of girls from Gtown and went on a boat cruise on the Seine, which was very beautiful at sunset.
Friday, we spent most of the day at the Louvre, which was huge too! It was really impossible to even attempt to try and see everything, but we did get to see la Jaconde (the Mona Lisa), the Code of Hammurabi, and the Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques Louis David. I gotta say, AP Euro really came in handy, and I tried to a pic of everything I remembered from class, totaling about 200 pictures in all! Two days in a row of monstrous tourist attractions did not do our feet anygood, so we headed down to Montparnasse, where all the famous writers of the past hung out at certain cafés. In our search for something cheap, we ended up stopping at a restaurant called Indiana, which was a Tex-Mex place with pictures of Native Americans everywhere-something was obviously lost in the translation…After that, we caught a movie, Whatever Works by Woody Allen.
Saturday, we split up into smaller groups for a while. I went to the Musée d’Orsay, an old train station converted into a museum of impressionist painters, with artists such as Monet, van Gogh, and Delacroix. We then went back to the Arc de Triomphe and went up this time with our museum passes, and then down to the Musée de l’Orangerie to see Monet’s Water Lily paintings, which were quite incredible! After that, we saw Napoleon’s tomb at l’Hôtel des Invalides, stopped at Louis Vitton for one of the girls in our group (actually to take a picture there for here brother-kinda strange), and then went to Montmartre and la Basilique de Sacré Coeur, where we had a nice view of the whole city. That night, we went to la Tour Eiffel for the 4th of July, and sang the National Anthem right before midnight-oh how American we were!
Sunday, we got up early and went to Mass at Notre Dame, which I thought was pretty cool to do. We took the Metro out the to business district of Paris and went up the big cube, la Défense, for yet another beautiful view of the city. After lunch, we headed to the Panthéon to see the tombs of famous stars of history such as Zola, Dumas, the Curies, JJ Rousseau, Braille, and Voltaire, before checking out les Jardins de Luxembourg. We caught our train that evening for Tours, with much sadness in our hearts that our vacation was over. It really felt weird when we got back too, as we’d lost that big city atmosphere of Paris.
So we’ve finally started classes too-Monday we had our oral exam to see where we should be placed. It was a bit painful, because me and a few others had to wait around as apparently there was some problem with our test, but then there wasn’t-I’m still not sure what happened! The oral itself wasn’t bad, and I must have done ok, because I ended up somehow placing into avancé, which is level 8/9 out of 9 levels here. Merci M. Turner!
Class has gone well so far too. We have 15 hours/week of French language class, which for me has so far meant reading a story, discussing the themes, and then presenting to the class; 2 hours of phonetics; and 4.5 hours of options, which will include 3 hours on French civilization and 1.5 hours on French-English translation (which is what I chose). All in all though, pretty well, and no homework so far either, haha, knock on wood!
As I said, pretty long post-thanks for reading it, if you’ve made it this far! Time to go play with my French bros and sis! More pics to come!
Peace
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