The Latin Quarter (And Our Group's Biggest Mistake So Far)

This was a momentous day.

Why, you ask? Because for the first time on this trip, I actually made the effort to get fully fancified.(translation: I curled my hair.)

Whoooooaaa! I'm actually capable of looking . . . put together???  Craaaazy . . .

Side note: Anna told me I looked like a Parisian today, which was kind of the goal, so, score! Maybe one day they will look upon me as one of their own . . .

Jk, watch as I do something horribly embarrassing in a few days in front of a bunch of people and the sense of belonging evaporates completely.

Anyway.

Me and Anna decided to go out to the open market in the downtown area of Croissy, just a few minutes away from our house. It was a good decision.

There was more than just flowers and clothes, though--tons of stands were full of food! Fresh fruit, beef, chicken, seafood, cheese, and tons more! (Plus one stand where there was a guy gutting/beheading a fish . . . I decided not to take a picture of that one, though.)

We met up with Anisa and Quincy and walked around for a bit longer, then Quincy came with Anna and me and we got on the train to go to Paris for the day!

Can I just take a moment to say how happy I am that the sky has been so pretty for the majority of our time here? I know it's probably going to change soon, but I mean, come on:

It was an almost ridiculously vibrant shade of blue in real life. So cool.

Anyway, we spent our morning doing a Paris walk in the Latin Quarter, which was full of narrow streets and good-smelling food, and a whole lotta history.

Case in point: this church, which wasn't far at all from Notre Dame, was called L'Eglise Saint-Severin, and it was built (well, re-built--originally built in the 1000s) in 1495. 

We weren't able to go inside because mass was about to start--just our luck, amirite?--but I'll probably want to go visit again soon, because I saw a ton of posters about upcoming concerts that will take place in this church, and on at least five different days different pianists will be performing selected works by Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and all my other faves. Scratch that 'probably--' I'm definitely going back for that.

We also visited Le Procope, which is the oldest cafe in Paris. It was founded in 1686 and there are cool painted portraits just inside the windows of people like Robespierre and Ben Franklin, who visited the cafe hundreds of years ago. 

Swanky.

After walking around for a while we started to get hungry, so we stopped in at a little creperie and got crepes. Mine had chicken, spinach, and cream:

It was incredibly yummy. Mmmmmm.

We continued our walk by going out into a bigger street, where we found the French Academy, which is basically where they decide Which Words Get to Be Words and Which Things are Not Grammatically Correct. I am going to be nicknaming it The Snobby Language Palace.

Despite its name, The Snobby Language Palace is really quite pretty. Have a look: 

We kind of just hung out on the steps of this building for a while, since our feet were so sore. I got another few pictures of the prettiness that surrounded us: 

We finished our walk by following the Seine towards Pont Neuf, which is the oldest bridge in Paris. Here's a picture of me next to it:

Side note: Anna likes to take candid pictures, which is fun because it means she gets cool shots like these:

But it also meant that she had the freedom to take THIS gem by zooming in way too close on my face:

Thanks a lot, Anna. (I kind of look like I'm prepping to straight-up murder somebody there.)

Anyway, since that was the end of our Paris walk, and it was still only about 3:00, we headed over to meet up with Grace, Lauren, and Anisa to do another walk.

Okay, let me preface this by saying that you should NEVER, under ANY circumstance, do what we did. Two walks in one day is NOT a good idea, and you're about to find out why, but before we get to that point, please observe this cool statue made out of clocks:

Why is it there? I dunno. Moving on.

This walk that we were planning to do was the metro walk. We figured, hey, if all we're doing is getting on and off the metro, we should hardly have to walk at all, right? It'll be a breeze!

We were so young and naive.

Long story short, it took us three hours to finish that walk (which was after we'd just been on another 2-hour walk, mind you), and we were all so tired by the end we didn't know what to do with ourselves.

Even though we probably (definitely) should have stopped at the halfway point and finished the walk another day, as I pointed out (and as the guidebook recommended because this walk could get really long and tiring), everyone else was just like, "No, let's just finish it!!! It won't be that bad!!!"

Cut to an hour and a half later, and everybody was complaining and saying that this was a terrible idea and we should have split the walk into two parts.

I was just like:





WELL THAT'S WHAT YOU GET, GUYS.

In spite of my whining (and the very real pain in my feet throughout this adventure), we actually did see some pretty cool stuff, like this tollhouse that was one of only four left in the city after the other 50 were destroyed during the French Revolution:

And ride in a couple above-ground metro lines that let you see around Paris, so that was cool:

But most importantly, we found THIS:

This is so interesting to me. What exactly does that mean, 'Paris Fried Chicken?' what makes it specifically Parisian as opposed to, y'know, regular fried chicken? The world may never know . . .

After forty minutes or so of hopping trains (which is much more exhausting and stressful than it sounds, btw), our guidebook brought us to this cool art nouveau metro entrance that we literally had to go out into the middle of nowhere to see:

Is it cool? Yes. Is it extra-twenty-minutes-on-the-metro cool? Ehhhh . . . I think I was just so tired by this point, I'd lost the ability to appreciate beauty. 

On the way back into town after that lil' escapade, the guidebook told us to take a break at this cool mall, which we did. I really liked the neat sculpture-thingy on top of the building:

The way it's arranged gives the illusion that all the shapes are floating in midair, which is pretty cool. 

We kept on going after the mall (even though literally everybody in our group was ready for death) and did manage to finish the walk. Anisa, Quincy, Anna and I all trudged home and collapsed. I had a killer, and I mean killerrrr, headache, which morphed into a migraine, so that was not fun. At least we were done walking for the day.

Oh, I almost forgot: shortly after we got back Anna ran into my room and told me that the toilet was flooding. Sure enough, there was water splashing over the sides of the toilet, and we both kind of freaked out because the toilets are different here and you can't turn off the water the same way. We mopped it up with an old towel and waited, because our host parents weren't home and we had no idea what to do with ourselves.

As it turned out, though, that's the best thing we could've done, because by the time we were ready to go to bed the toilet water had gone back down to its normal level. Problem solved? Maybe . . . but we still don't know what made it overflow, so it might do it again . . . 

Ehhh, that's a problem for another day.

Well, to conclude, Saturday was a day that started out very pleasant and over time morphed into a day that just went on for too long. I don't know about the other people in that group, but personally I am never doing two walks in the same day again.

Song of the day: these guys we happened upon in the Latin Quarter! Sorry it's not a very long clip (also sorry to the random photographer who got caught in my shot), but I just had to get a little recording of this band, who sounded like they belonged in The Princess and the Frog:

That's all from me for now! Hope your day is fantastic!