Oh Paris, how I loved thee...

Home again, home again. That's honestly how I feel being back in Prague, which is actually a surprisingly wonderful feeling. As I mentioned in my last posts, I had started to grow tired of Prague in many ways because the new and exciting feeling had faded. However, leaving the city made me realize that I wasn't really growing tired of it, I was just starting to feel like it was home as I grew comfortable here. Of course I miss home back in Milwaukee, but I love it here as well. It's the people that I truly miss in Milwaukee, although I do miss the city itself too. I can't wait to be back home to go to a Brewers game, or stop at Buffalo Wild Wings, or go running along Lake Michigan...things like that! It was actually a little disorienting to be in Paris, because I was not only away from my real home, but I was also away from my temporary home, and Paris was a completely new experience altogether.

A new experience, as well as a fabulous one. Although many people have told me that the city "isn't all it's cracked up to be", "it's all hype"...I didn't feel that way at all. Paris has a lovely, romantic, and elusive spirit about it, and one that I eagerly tried to capture. I felt as though, at times, I was able to grab onto that spirit, and it was exciting. I am a lover of all things historical, and walking down the streets of Paris filled my mind with thoughts of who might have once walked here and what happened here. Prague is an incredibly old city, but unfortunately, it's never found anywhere in a Western history book, so when I came here, I didn't arrive with childhood dreams of what I wanted to see and do. Not so with Paris! (It's the same with Italy, I think, I am so excited to be going to cities like Venice and Rome!).

I traveled to Paris with a fellow AAU study abroad student, Madison, and luckily, we both had similar agendas for what we wanted to see. I got into everything except for the Eiffel Tower for free; the Louvre was free on Friday night to students, the Palace of Versailles was free because I was considered an EU student (thanks to that visa that caused me innumerable headaches in getting! I'm glad it was good for something.), and on the first Sunday of every month, the museums are free, so we went to see Centre Pompidou and Musee d'Orsay for free. Everything about the trip went incredibly smoothly from start to finish; I couldn't have asked for anything more. The sun was out most of the weekend, and although the wind could be bitterly cold, it was generally just sunny and chilly most of the time. I had never stayed in a hostel before this trip, and it turned out to be a great first experience. Our only trouble was with how cold our room got, but I slept with 3 blankets and did just fine =) Our hostel was almost all students, and we all would gather in the lounge and chat, exchanging travel tips, discounts, and restaurant ideas. Madison and I spent Saturday with two friends that I met at breakfast that morning; although I am quite extroverted, I have a hard time making initial contact with people, but that morning, I told myself that although Madison was sleeping still and I was alone coming to breakfast, I wouldn't eat alone. I sat down with a bunch of people, introduced myself, and started asking where everyone was from. I was proud of myself, because as I said, it's actually really difficult for me to initiate conversation with people I don't know. I'm working on that....and I'm glad that I did so, because I made new friends that we were then able to travel with.

Traveling to Versailles was our day trip on Saturday, and it was a great trip. The Palace of Versailles is stunningly gorgeous, and I can't believe that somebody built that to live in. I was blown away by the architecture and landscape, the colors and fabrics, the vibrancy and grandeur. I also loved thinking about the history of the Palace, and of what it must have been like that night that the French peasants broke through the gates of Versailles and dragged King Louis XVI back to Paris. I have always loved history, but I have a professor back at UW-Milwaukee that has especially piqued my interest in European history, and after having a course with him about the French Revolution last year, I really wanted to see Paris. It was so fun to imagine the history of both Versailles and Paris; I think that I could spend a couple years of my life living in Europe reading old history books in cute street cafes and be perfectly content.

Madison and I conquered the public transportation in Paris on the first day. Our first time on the metro, we felt overwhelmed, but after studying the metro map for a little while, we figured out the system. Then it made perfect sense. However, we had our fair share of squeezing underneath the turnstiles at the metro stations. For some reason, many of the tickets we bought would not work on the machines, even if we literally had just purchased them a few feet away from the turnstile. At first, we felt embarrassed squeezing through, but by the last day, we had become experts at it. Our tickets worked less than half the time, and besides, I will confess, the last day we were there, we were out of tickets and-not wanting to spend any more money-just slipped through the turnstiles every time we got there. Ah well... =)

The food in Paris was oh-so-good. We ate out a couple times, but we also went to the grocery store for some of our meals. I will admit, it's slightly easier to grocery shop when all the food names are in French as opposed to Czech, since French is so much more like English than Czech is. Anyways, while I knew that crepes were of course a classic French food, I had no idea that that would mean that it would be sold literally on every street corner. It was everywhere. And the Nutella craze was full-blown. There were containers of it being sold in the grocery store that were up to a liter in size. Number of calories = who cares? The stuff's delicious! And besides, I always had bananas with my Nutella, so it was a bit healthier ;-) I bought some brie there, and we munched on baguettes. I always found it funny when I'd see people walking on the street with their long baguettes poking out of the bag, tearing off pieces of bread as they went and munching it. Silly Parisians, that's why you keep your food safely in the bag all the way, so that you don't eat everything just on the walk home. I know I'd have everything polished off if my bread was sticking out like that in plain view, tempting me.

Speaking of the Parisians, either Madison and I got lucky, or the stereotype isn't right, but the people we met in Paris were incredibly nice. We had people stop on the street when they saw us with a map and ask us where we were trying to go. It was nice to realize that so many people spoke English, because while almost everybody under 30 speaks some English here in Prague, it gets difficult to find someone over 30 that speaks it. In summary, Paris was an absolute blast, it was a dream trip, and I am so glad that we did it. To be able to spend a 4-day weekend in Paris makes me feel incredibly lucky; a 90 minute plane ride and we were there! I know I'll be back someday, Paris. You were wonderful to me, and you were a gracious hostess. Expensive at times, yes, but so worth it!