Waffles and Crepes!

Last week I was in Brussels and Paris with my group and then on my own. It was AMAZING. There’s no way to describe Paris so I’ll just start off with some particularly good moments…

Bollywood on the top of the Eiffel Tower

How did this come about you might ask? FAIR QUSTION. I was exhausted Friday night so my friend and I took a nap at around 7:30…we woke up at 8:15 and knew we had two options: big adventure or bed time. We opted for adventure! So we took the metro across town to the Eiffel Tower area, walked around, and decided we had to go up. It was pretty rainy so there was literally NO line – that’s quite the Eiffel Tower miracle. Even so Danika and I struggled to determine where we were supposed to go… we had to consult at least three guards. One even asked to have his picture taken with us. It was JUST the two of us riding up the first car and the tower started sparkling! Every hour at night it sparkles for a couple minutes….but from the inside? That was crazy cool and random. So we wandered around the top – which was windy and rainy – but the VIEWS! Hey, I’m not from the Northwest for nothing, I was totally into the rain.

Then the magic began… Three Indian men asked us to take their video on top of the tower – after some technical difficulty we fully recorded them doing a ditty and dance in Hindi and I had to drop the ILOVEINDIA bomb. They were SO EXCITED that I had been to India – that I knew anything about it really. They gave me way more credit than I deserved. As in, I just listed places I had been and mentioned that I liked Sivaji and you would have thought I was some sort of demi-god for how they reacted. They had been traveling for a month because one of them is getting married in December (Danika and I are now obviously invited). We made QUITE the scene the five of us – they taught us a couple of Hindi and Gujarati songs and we – I – asked random passersby to take videos of us all dancing. I befriended a Spanish woman asking her to take one of the videos - she struggled to respond in French then we shifted to English and finally landed on Spanish. Languages!

Nuit Blanche

Every year, just once a year, all of Paris stays up all night and roams the city looking at random art displays. I happened to be in Paris for that day! It’s called Nuit Blanche which technically means “white night” but is colloquial for “all-nighter”. I wandered around with friends, soaking it up and generally had a splendid time.

Things I saw on Nuit Blanche:

1. Troop of artists dressed up as sort of questionable looking rabbits - and one orange man - doing interpretive dance.

2. Float blasting techno-rave music filled with people interpretively protesting genocide in Sudan… hard to describe. No one smiled/showed any emotion. A woman was yelling over the loudspeaker about acceptance and culture….they had weird clothes.

3. Fire thrower and fire spitter in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral

4. Artistic film projected on an old city-fortress wall

5. SO MANY PEOPLE along the Seine

6. Weird animal balloons on the exterior of part of the Louvre

7. Video/light show inside a cathedral…it was so weird.

8. Beautiful Paris, all lit up J

A-Wandering!

One of the best, best things I think you can do in Paris is to just WALK. I walked with my friend from our hostel which was next to the MOULIN ROUGE (yes, dream come true!) to the Louvre, all the way along the Seine to the Eiffel Tower, up to the Arc de Triumph, along the Champs Elysee, past the Opera house and Galleries Lafayette, and back to the Moulin Rouge. It was a TREK!