disneyland paris.

First off, you would think Paris would be up to date on the whole free WiFi but they aren't. The internet is so spotty here it is ridiculous...I'm using an ethernet cable. Oh and the French pronounce WiFi Wee Fee which we make fun of all the time. 

On Sunday we went to Versailles to go to stake conference which I was late for because a group of us decided to follow a kid who know where he was going but we ended up across town at another church that was not it. So we trekked across town to the other side to get to the convention center where stake conference was being held, which was right by the Chateau we need to visit afterward. This little trip included an hour to an hour and a half of travel on the train, which we didn't have to take because there was a train much closer to the convention center that got there much quicker too and it was freezing in a skirt, so I was not in the best mood for stake conference or the rest of the day. 

After stake conference which was great to listen in French and English (a missionary was translating for us) we headed to the Hall of Mirror which is where Marie Antoinette lived. The Hall were very pretty and luxurious but freaking crowded, there were so many people there it was insane. After we went to the gardens, they went on for miles. It was neat to see how well kept they were, it was beautiful! Just a brief summary of what I did on Sunday, and now back to what the post is really about...

DISNEYLAND PARIS!

Yesterday on Monday we had a group of about 12 that went to Euro Disney. It was great, maybe except for the weather at the beginning because it was pouring, but overall a fun adventure. They had 2 parks there at Euro Disney, Disneyland and Walt Disney Studios. We headed to Disneyland first because that's what you're supposed to do whenever you go to Disney. They were celebrating their 20th anniversary so there were lots 20's everywhere. 

We went to Sleeping Beauty's Castle.

They had beautiful stained glass telling the story of Sleeping Beauty, the fairies were always my favorite.

Aurora and Phillip.

Mr. Smee.

I was entrusted with the time card at Buzz Lightyear, as you can tell I was excited.

Mad-Hatter Tea cups.

Paesha, Me and Demarie in the Tea Cups.

Walt and Mickey with a little reenactment. 

Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream on Main Street, sadly no waffle cones.

Vermuntster and Cookie Dough

It's a Small World, glad to know other countries think we are all cowboys.

One of my new favorite things to do in Frontierland...but it was 2 Euros so I wasn't gonna pay that when at Disneyland Cali it's only 50 cents!

A cute pink Mickey Mouse.

Disneyland was lots of fun! We went on Space Mountain and had a little episode with some throw-up. This kid totally just threw up everywhere and we saw this happening before our eyes, it was disgusting. We also went on Hollywood Tower of Terror which is always a favorite, and then we went on Rock'n Rollin Coster, it was like being at an Aerosmith concert while being on a Roller Coaster, it was awesome. Then there was this other called Crush's Coaster, it was like being on the EAC with Crush and Squirt. I had my first Fish n Chips experience, it was quite good! Overall it was a great day in Euro Disney. One thing that was weird was that men were in the LADIES bathroom. Hello there were men's bathrooms too, I don't know why they were in there, maybe it is some weird French culture thing they do. Welp that's it for now, today we leave Paris to travel around France for a bit then to Belgium and Amsterdam. 

Au Revoir.

delectable.

Being in Paris you think of all the scrumptious French foods like crepes, baguettes, fancy cheeses and croissants. Although nutella crepes are divine, I found a new love for gyros and fancy gelato. Here are some pictures of some lumping awesome food I ate while here in Paris!

{Cami, Demarie and I with our gyros}

These are the best thing ever! First you take the pita and lather some sour cream or some greek sauce that is amazing. Then you add the lamb of awesomeness, lettuce, tomatoes and to top it all off FRIES! (Does this remind any of you of Sandlot? s'mores...) This was tres tres bon. 

This was the delicious gelato place and supposedly the best in Paris. It is called Amorino and they sell gelato of all sorts and I think belgian waffles or something like that. But they make your gelato into a little petite flower with all the different flavors you choose.  I chose hazelnut, nutella and strawberry, of course the hazelnut and nutella were practically the same but let's be real they were scrumptious plus the strawberry was great!

Earlier yesterday we went to the Notre Dame to walk inside and climb to the top. This is me hanging out with my gargoyle friends plus the view of Paris.

{Cami, Me and Carol at the Top of Notre Dame}

We climbed into the little doorway to go and see the bell in the tower, sadly I didn't see Quasimodo ringing the bells. They don't ring this bell anymore because it causes structural damage to the building, so they just play recordings. 

{Inside the Cathedral}

The Cathedral inside is amazing! The stained glass is unreal and so intricate. Later we went to Sainte-Chapelle to see the chapel there in the Palace de Justice. The upstairs windows were all stained glass and the room with filled with different colors of light from the windows. It is crazy how detailed each pane is and different each on is.

{Sainte-Chapelle}

Just a little taste of what I am having in Paris.
Enjoy.

bon appétit.

overload.

Bonjour mon amis! 

Hello my friends!

I hope everything is well back in the good ol' USA. Paris is just dandy. The So for the past couple of days I have been not so good on keeping up to date the things we have done, so bear with me as I try to go through 3 days worth of seeing Paris. Here we go!

Monday

We had a 3 hour long tour of Paris, where we were able to romp around the city and see it from a different point of view. It was awesome to just wander and explore the streets of Paris. Although the tour was FOREVER, it was great learn different things about the city, the people and the culture. 

Here are a few highlights from the tour.

For the Ratatouille Fans out there, here is where Chef Gusteau's Restaurant is supposed to be. It is on the Seine River and just south of it is Notre Dame. 

 Chef Gusteau's Restaurant 

We went to the bridge called "Lock Bridge" because of all the locks people come to put on to "lock" their love with one another. Funny thing is someone from the city comes and cuts the locks off every so often that they don't last that long. 

The Louvre. The LOUVRE. On our tour we just walked around it, but it is beautiful! The architecture here is magnificent that these pictures don't do it justice. Bonus, they were setting up for Fashion Week next week here! Later on I'll talk more about my trip to the Louvre.

After a long 3 hours and walking a bagillion miles, our tour was over. We ended right at the start of the 

Champs-Elysees, the 2nd most expensive street in Paris (it's similar to 5th Ave in New York but much, much more to see and walk). Which I might also add is FOREVER long, but filled with luxurious designer shops like Hugo Boss, and Louis Vuitton (which had a line for the entrance all the way around the corner).  At the end of Champs-Elysee is the Arc de Triomphe, which is a large archway built for Napoleon and his victories. I spent a couple euros to climb to the top, which is about 550+ stairs that are in a spiral to the top, let's just say my legs felt a little like jelly after that, but the view was gorgeous. I saw almost all of Paris and almost all of the main sites the city is know for. 

Tuesday

This was the first day of many we had to ourselves to plan, but we had plenty of museums to see for our classes. First we went to the Les Invalides, which is an army museum filled with all kinds of history and exhibits. The ones I enjoyed were World War I and World War II memorial exhibit and Napoleon's tomb. It was HUGE! For just a small man this thing was like 20x his size. It was a bit of a let down because it looked like fake wood, you would like it would be bedazzled in jewels and gold but it's not. 

We hurried of to the Musee de Rodin, who was a famous and great sculptor. There were many pieces I liked but the ones that stuck out to me were The Kiss, The Thinker, Gates of Hell, and The Age of Bronze. 

After Rodin we headed over to Musee D'Orsay, which is quite a large museum. It starts from where the Louvre ended, from 1842-1916. Here we saw pieces of Edouard Manet and Vincent Van Gogh. The art is spectacular to see because it is the real deal, no fake or knock off imitation, it's the real thing! It is still unreal to me that Paris has so much history and artifacts from it. Later we wandered back over to Notre Dame to find this gelato shop our tour guide recommended, but we had no luck so we ended up buying crepes! My first ever REAL crepe from Paris, a piece of me squealed with excitement. I got a nutella with walnuts crepe...it was fresh to death, as you can tell I was super excited to eat. We went and ate our crepes by the Seine River right by Notre Dame with an old man playing an accordion...doesn't get more french than that right? 

Plus I bought a France tshirt...you can see in the coming pictures.

Wednesday

We started bright and early and went to the Pantheon which was a Christian Basilica but later turned into a monument in Paris. Here it houses many famous and life changing people. Here are the only ones I knew: 

Voltaire

Victor Hugo

Marie Curie

Alexandre Dumas

A bonus was finding the man who invented or came up with Braille, Louis Braille. 

We then made our way to the L'Orangerie which is close to the Louvre and Champ-Elysee but we stopped for some yummy ice cream. They made it into a little flower with the different flavors you got. Once at the L'Orangerie we say Claude Monet's Water lilies, which was absolutely stunning, his eye for detail and for mixing colors so well made the pieces sing. There was four large murals on each wall in a room that was an ellipse and there was another room just the same that had another set of four murals, both were to symbolize eternity or infinite, that it never ends. Then we say some of Renoir's paintings, Cezanne, Matisee as well as some of Picasso's. 

After a short break we headed over to the Louvre. It was ginormous! I had absolutely no clue where to go and where to look that it was just a picture overload. Plus with all the previous museums we went to it was just too much after a while. But besides that I really enjoyed the Louvre once I knew where to go and what to see. We say the Victory Wings, Venus de Milo, and the most prized art piece everyone and their dog comes to see, The Mona Lisa. We were lucky to have not fought  our way to the front to see the piece, but it was beautiful! In the picture it's not that in focus but you can see it in the background. That thing is behind 5 inches thick of glass, just think what it would take to crack that! Our tour guide told us that some tried to throw a shoe, and even a bottle of pee...um can you say gross, who the lump does that? 

The Louvre is so huge it will take 8 years to see every piece of art with only looking at it for 30 seconds. Our tour guide Sam told us some people have a race of who can sprint the Louvre the fastest, so far the record is 12 minutes...with only 9 arrests to trying and get that. 

(It's not sponsored by the Louvre)

Well that pretty much sums up the last couple of days here and how I spent them. As I said before OVERLOAD of museums...and the metro.

Au Revoir.

bonjour.

Bonjour from Paris! 

It has been quite an eventful two days so far. The flight here was so so so long! I really didn't know what to do during that time. I read and read and read Jane Eyre, managed to get about two hours of sleep that flight which was no fun with such small space. Oh plus all the free booze that everyone was drinking  Then we got to the Paris Airport in the morning the next day where we had no clue to go because everything was in French, no figure right? It took us almost an hour just to get our ticket for the train to Paris, that did not include the bus we had to take to just get to the train because apparently all the trains and metro were down on Saturday. Then we went on the metro, which is not as nice as the subways in New York, and that is saying something, but they do have nice carpet seats...gross. But you have to walk EVERYWHERE, no wonder most Europeans are so fit. After getting of the Metro we had to walk, what seemed like a mile or more, to our  hotel which is like a small apartment. Trying doing all of that with a backpack stuffed with heaviness and lugging two suitcases up and down those blasted stairs and in between the seats of the train/metro...equals not much fun and blisters up the ying-yang on your hand. *note to self: bring only ONE bag next time!

After getting to the hotel 4 hours later, we were all exhausted and tired from the long trek we had to go and walk some more. First we got a little tour of our hotel and where the market is, which has the best best croissant I have ever eaten, it was butter and soft yet it had a nice crust to it. Back to the tour, we then walked about a 10 minutes give or take to the Eiffel Tower! It was filled with tourists up the wazoo and plenty of street venders trying to sell you mini Eiffel Towers. It was great to see it and just walk about the city for a bit, but I would have enjoyed much more if I had a couple more of hours sleep. But overall it was a successful day in Paris. It is a nice city filled with neat architecture, and  lots of smokers, like a lot of smokers....I really hate that smell.

After a glorious sleep we were off to church (a small group of 10), all French speaking. It took awhile to get to the church, we left about an hour and a half to get there. We had to the Metro and two different trains to get there, plus about a mile or so to walk to the building. It was fun just traveling about the city finding our way there, walking about the small streets while a like a street market was going was great! Once we got there the church, which is squished in between two building, wasn't open yet but there were three members there waiting. We trying to ask if they spoke English but they didn't so it was hard to communicate with them. Others started coming and we all said our "Bonjour" and they just rambled on in French, which I had no clue what the were saying. First we went to Relief Society in a small room that later we had to change because we had so many ladies. We sang the Hymns in French which was hard to do because I have absolutely no background in French, but I went tried as best I could. Then we had our lesson taught in French but a nice member was kind enough to translate for us non-French speakers. Then we had Sunday school that was in English, it was great to finally understand something, after that we had Sacrament meeting. It was great to see all the members there, most are converts, but it was nice to know that the Church is True where ever you go no matter the language barrier. After Church, we make the trek back to the hotel and later today we are going to explore the city some more, maybe like go see Notre Dame. Tomorrow we have a 3 hour tour of the city then we have free time everyday to see the museums for class or just explore the city until we leave to travel more of France. So that is it for now, kind of a long post but there is more great adventures to come!

Au Revoir! 

seven.

Exactly seven days from today I will be off to the city of lights! I can't wait to live in Europe for the next couple of months!