Hello, dear readers, happy Easter, and my apologies. Do I know that spring break has been over for well over two weeks now? Yes. Do I know it's been eleven days since I last wrote anything at all? Yes. But as today is Easter Monday - a classic Notre Dame holiday and, conveniently, a Bank one - my schedule for the day and my sleep schedule from last night has finally afforded me the time and energy to finish blogging about my SB2K13 adventures. So here we go!
If you'll think back to my last post about the events of spring break, you'll recall that I left off on my final day in Florence. I had finished Venice, I had had my requisite weird 21st birthday going out experience, and I was about three gelatos shy of leaving Italy behind for two and a half weeks. The rest of our time in Italy was eventful and, as always, food-filled. At my birthday dinner, our favorite little Florentine restaurant treated us to free-ish bruschetta, free champagne, free after-dinner shots of limoncello (because citrus-flavored hard alcohol is the new coffee), and - just when you thought you couldn't get better than the small cake of a few nights before - free medium-sized cake...with strawberries. The next day took us to Pisa for a few hours, where we took pictures of the surprisingly lean-y tower, met some Mormon missionaries, and even spent a solid hour and a half on an accidental, terrifying free bus tour of the Pisan countryside. The main portion of Spring Break Part 2, however, was spent in the city I've studied more frequently than any other in the world: Paris.
Our five-day stay in Paris was really the main thing that drew me to this trip, and Paris provided me with a wealth of experiences that I will not soon forget. Mostly, though, this portion of our spring break showed me that I seriously need to branch out in terms of the cities where my favorite movies are set.
Thanks to Moulin Rouge, Midnight in Paris, Les Mis, Passport to Paris (yes, that one), and even a significant portion of my all-time favorite film, The Devil Wears Prada, there were hardly more than five minutes at a time during our days in France when I wasn't quoting or talking about a movie that I basically have memorized. "I recently read a two-volume biography of Rodin." "Love is a many-splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love!" "Don't be silly, Andrea, everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us." "Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour - oh my God."
You think that's annoying in paragraph form? Imagine how much worse it was in person, for five straight days.
Despite the non-stop quote-fest, though, Paris was exactly as it should be: magnifique. For me, there were two main things that placed Paris in a league of its own among spring break destinations. The first is that it allowed me to use a bit of my rather rusty French. It's been a while since I've taken a class, but I did study the language for three years in high school and three semesters at ND, so I like to occasionally pretend I'm decent at speaking it. Paris gave me a great outlet for this semi-delusional belief. Trying to buy a box of macarons at the famous and heavenly Laduree in the middle of a miles-long rush hour line? Order in French! Need to explain that, as a US citizen studying in an EU member nation that's not the one you're travelling in, you should, in fact, qualify for a museum entry fee discount? Definitely don't use your native language for that! Lost on the entirely confusing Métro? French again! To my delight, though, the Parisians really were remarkably accepting of my desperate desire to speak their language. On one occasion, my French got me directions from a butcher shop to a patisserie around the corner where we could still buy baguettes at 6 PM. At Versailles, it allowed me to skip the crowds around the English signs and take in most of the info about each room while also being forced to use my brain. In my one big French mistake of the weekend, my French "skills" got me pure Brazilian chocolate macarons instead of plain chocolate - darn. My French knowledge also allowed me to play this really fun game all weekend where I would make my travel buddies try to read things in French and then laugh at their horribly mangled pronunciations. It was great!
The second half of the beauty of Paris (besides the actual, physical beauty of the city itself and all of its sights, sounds, tastes, and smells) is that, for any 18-25-year-old studying in the European Union, almost every attraction is totally free. By simply flashing my UK visa, I got in free to nearly every major site of the city: the Louvre, Versailles, the Musée de l'Orangerie (home of the incredible Monet water lilies), Les Invalides (home of Napoleon's tomb), the observation deck of the Arc de Triomphe, and the Rodin Museum (home of The Thinker and of a whole lot of Midnight in Paris references), to name a few. We saw these things, the Cathedrale de Notre Dame and the Basilique Sacre-Coeur, the artists' village of Montmartre and the site of the Moulin Rouge, almost every from-the-ground angle of the Eiffel Tower, and, on the first day, two of my dearest friends from Vision 2012 - all for free.
From walking the streets of the Latin Quarter at sunset sharing baguettes and gossip with my favorite Flute Fairy on day one to watching the entire Mary-Kate & Ashley Paris classic in our apartment on our rainy last night, Paris made for a fantastic second half of spring break.
None of our experiences on break, of course, would have been possible without our absolutely insane accommodations. Between the 4-star hotel in Venice and the varying degrees of luxury flats in Florence and Paris, our digs on this trip were nothing short of insane. Each one also has its own crazy story to go with it, usually involving us standing in the rain fearing homelessness. So, now that I've written, at long last, spring break blog part 2, stay tuned for the final SB2K13 entry: Spring Break Cribs. And once that's written, I'll move on to more recent events - Easter in Rome, known also as The Best Weekend of My Life. Thanks for the memories, Paris, and readers, keep reading to see which city wins in the battle between European travel-movie titans that is Passport to Paris vs. The Lizzie McGuire Movie.
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