Hey everyone! We started bright and early this morning meeting Dr. Gaspar downstairs at 7:45am to head to the Palace of Versailles. We had a 9am reservation and it took us about 45 minutes to reach the Palace. The place was really extravagant and we saw a lot of really cool rooms. Dr. Gaspar had given us 3 hours to see the place, but most of us finished viewing the rooms in just over an hour. A couple of us decided to spend the remaining two hours viewing the gardens which was an extra 6 Euro to visit, but it was definitely worth it. The palace gardens were beautiful and probably the prettiest gardens I’ve ever seen. They had really extravagant designs and fountains all over the property. They had choreographed the fountains to music which was really cool to see.
We left the Palace of Versailles, to tour the Louvre. I think the Louvre is the largest art gallery in the world with over 80,000 pieces to view, but I could be wrong. I knew from yesterday, the place was ridiculously big. But you could seriously get lost in this without the thousands of signs in there. None of us were really big art fans, so we decided to hit the major paintings and sculptures. We spent about 2.5 hours looking around and saw pieces like the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. We also saw some of Napoleon’s furniture he had in his apartments. The Mona Lisa the most famous piece of all painted by Leonardo de Vinci isn’t actually all that large. I knew about what to expect, so I wasn’t disappointed but I think some people might have been. The Mona Lisa had a room to itself and was behind what looked like about 5-6 inches of glass. We were allowed to take pictures which shocked me because in the Italian museums we weren’t allowed to take pictures of David or the Sistine Chapel.
After leaving the Louvre, we walked around the city, most of which I had seen the previous day. But we did go up on this large hill on the outside of town, which had a really neat view of the city. We saw the sunset and this really cool street soccer performer. He was standing up on the pillar (about 2 feet by 2 feet) and did all sorts of juggling tricks. I had seen quite a few of these before but he did a few things I’d never seen and was really impressed by. At the end of his act, he climbed a 15 ft pole while the ball was perfectly balance on his forehead and then proceeded to do acrobatics while holding the ball to his foot. It was a really neat thing to see and he made quite a bit of money from what I could see. I heard that he apparently makes close to 2000 Euros a night which is a nice chunk of change. I wish I would have gotten a video, but my camera was dying. Around 10:30, we headed over to the Eiffel Tower and hung around till about midnight. Tomorrow we head back to Strasbourg around 2pm and get in about 7:30pm. It’s been a great weekend and I really like Paris. We have our first two midterms this coming Wednesday which should be so much fun (Sarcasm) and then I’m off to London for the weekend which should be a blast. I will probably update everyone next weekend, because I’ll be studying and prepping this week. Hope everyone in Texas is doing great. I’m starting to miss home. Europe is fun, but Texas is where I belong. Missing those I’m close to; see ya’ll in just under 3 weeks!
Jonathan
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