Bonjour Paris!

Bonjour! Salut mes amis!

My 3 day weekend in Paris was the BEST YET and I am so filled with joy and thankfulness that it was my last European adventure (for the time being), the grand finale.

It was a weekend of strange and eerie coincidences. First off, Devin and I ran into Leigh from Art History class and her friend studying in Siena while touring the Musee d'Orsay. Then we ran into them again as the Louvre, but this time there was a girl with them that I knew I recognized. It turned out to be Courtney Martin from Whitworth, who came accross Leigh and Melanie her friend because she asked them to take a photograph of her in the Louvre, and once they started chatting, they realized that Courtney's best friend in Northern Ireland (where's she's studying) is a close friend of Leigh and Melanie's back at their small private school in Virginia. The weird gets weirder. Then Courtney and I flipped out when we recognized each other and instantly got into discussion about Whitworth and how we couldn't believe how many freaking mutual friends we have yet we weren't friends yet. Courtney was supposed to meet up with Candace Farley, another Whitworth student I'd recognize, somewhere in Paris but they were separated and neither had phones. But lo and behold, all of us are wandering the Louvre which is packed on Friday nights with free entrance after 6 pm, and we run into Candace! What!?! And Candace said she thought she saw me earlier that day at the Musee d'Orsay and had to do a double take. So then us five plus Kristin our Milan program friend from New York met up and hit the town together. It seriously was the most perfectly smooth weekend ever. Candace and Courtney were even staying at the same hostel as us! AH! We all went out to dinner together in the city of love, drank French wine in a trendy artsy French quarter, dined on delicious French cuisine with fun live French music in a quaint restaurant. I was able to see ALL the sights I wanted to and timing was perfect, I couldn't have asked for more. We saw the Musee d'Orsay (the best impressionist museum in the world), le centre pompidou (modern art), teh Louvre of course, La Tour Eiffel, Notre-Dame, Sainte-Chapelle (the most amazing stained glass chapel in Europe), Sacre Coeur, the Seine, L'Arc de Triomphe and lots more! Oh yeah, and on the first night Devin and I went on a Pub Crawl with some hostel folks...the leader was a guy that just ended a season of being on Big Brother and he was OUT OF CONTROL. His name is 'Crazy James' and he tells me people know him in Spokane and he's spent a lot of time there.....we also made friends with the coolest Swedish 'redneck' ever from Sweden's most northern villages.

I was struck by how all the stereotypes I have heard about Paris and Parisians were broken. In my opinion the Milanese are WAY more rude. We didn't encounter any rudeness or general unfriendliness among Parisians. I got to speak LOTS of French this weekend too which was amazing so that might have helped. The subway was enormous, probably even bigger than the London Underground, and we've been traveling to so many European cities by this point that we found navigating it simple and breezy (one night we saw an almost knife fight on our train car, yikes, ask me about it sometime!). And the portions of food were very large and filling, not tiny and not too overpriced (Italy is way worse in regards to both). The city was epically beautiful, even in December.

I couldn't have asked for a more magical weekend. Candace and I have already decided that we are hanging out this Jan Term and that our mutually friended friend-groups should merge because why not? We're both awesome and are in the same year at Whitworth? Yes, it was such a blessing to talk with the girls from Whitworth and to identify with them in that we're both off studying abroad in Europe where we are being exposed to so much, and all of us are in our sparate programs, trying to survive, figure out our lives and what it means to be Christians in this world on our own. It was so uplifting and the weekend was filled with too many coincidences to actually be coincidental.

I absolutely loved this infamous city and I will return someday.

Ciao! Now I have two weeks of finals preparation hell ahead of me....but 12 days and counting until a glorious return to my homeland of California and then my second but most lovely homeland of Washington State!