Still here

With four of us traveling together now, it has been a lot harder to find the time to update the blog, but I am still here, and here is a new update. I apologize for any typos, but French keyboards are very different from American ones, and they take some getting used to.

We made it to Paris without too much trouble and met up with Bryan and Christina on the 30th. We had three full days in Paris, and we made the most of them. The first day, we wandered around and did a tour of Parisian highlights such as the Place Bastille, Notre Dame, Place Concorde, and Tuileries, then we went to the Eiffel Tower at night to see the sun set. I felt a little like a tour guide at first, but then we all got in the groove and really enjoyed ourselves. We had some classic Parisian food, too: Croque Monsieur, salads, croissants, and pommes frites.

The second day, we did a whirlwind tour of the Louvre and hit all the big sights plus a bunch of the emptier rooms with beautiful sculptures. The whole place was packed, so we just spent a little time, then headed for Versailles. The palace is kind of expensive, and, in my opinion, overrated, so we just wandered around the gardens for a long time and saw the outsides of all the buildings. The exciting part of Versailles for us was when Andrew and Bryan decided to race and Andrew took a dive right into the gravel. I took pictures. He is totally okay now, but he looked pretty bad for a while.

Our last day in Paris we went to the Catacombs, which I thought were pretty creepy. I think I would be pretty upset if my bones ended up anonymously on public display like that. It was fascinating, though. That afternoon, the rain cleared up (apparently it rains outside of England, too) and we strolled down the Champs Elysses and had some world famous macarons at Laduree. They were different from macaroons I had tasted before; these were intensely flavoured airy cookies filled with buttercream, and they were out of this world. We had pistachio, rose, orange blossom, and lemon flavoured macarons and a pot of Tea a la Marie Antoinette. That evening, as we were getting ready to leave on the night train, we had another adventure at a local laundromat. Andrew is the only one of us who can speak any French, so we still don`t really understand what the problem was, but the owner came out of his office about halfway through and just started yelling at us in French and gesticulating wildly. We think he was angry that we were doing only one load of laundry, but Bryan and Christina had just gotten here, and none of us brought very many clothes. It was sort of humorous but also terrifying, because he was really furious at us and he would not stop yelling, even though we obviously couldn`t understand him. More on that later.

Right now, we are in Nice and there is free (and slow) internet access in our hotel, so I will write more tonight or tomorrow about our adventures in Spain. Au revoir!