Le Fin de Paris

Our last day. The Louvre. It seemed fitting to hit the most famous spot in Paris on our last full day in the city. I met up with my girl Meredith from home, who’s studying in the Latin Quarter, just outside the famous glass pyramid at the museum. The three of us trooped through the Egyptian exhibit, some Renaissance art, French and Italian painters and reached the very unfascinating Mona Lisa. She isn’t that pretty, the painting is about the size of a calendar, and I’m not entirely sure why this piece is Da Vinci’s most famous work. I’ve seen better. But still, it was cool to view the painting that has had so many scholars searching for answers behind that smile. More interesting was the Birth of Venus statue, the lovely Aphrodite represented in cream-colored stone with both her arms cut off. In fact, I just this week saw probably the second most famous work of Aphrodite, a painting in the Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. After seeing her in the Louvre, though, we were ready to go. This museum is the most unorganized, confusing, pain-in-the-butt tourist spot I’ve ever visited. You have to go up and down flights of stairs every three minutes to get from one exhibit to another and they follow no particular pattern among the randomly connected and disconnected rooms. I was glad to have seen the Louvre, since I didn’t when we visited Paris in sixth grade, and it’s just so huge! I still haven’t seen probably seven eighths of it.

After the Louvre, Meredith left to go ice-skating with her abroad program and Nick and I wandered beneath the Louvre into its underground mall. Here (yay!) I picked out my Valentine’s Day gift. Since V-day is a girl’s holiday and shopping in Paris is possibly the best present any girl could get, this was my gift. I had looked around a couple boutiques in Montmartre and even tried on a gorgeous jacket or two, but hadn’t found anything perfect yet, until I noticed the jewelry sitting in windows of Agatha Paris. Agatha is a line you can only find throughout France and carries lots of beautiful necklaces with simple but elegant beads – and one that I just loved! Luckily, Nick loved it too and got this for me for Valentine’s Day, the perfect gift. In fact, I’m wearing it as I write this and can’t wait to find some great earrings to match.

And so we said goodbye to Paris – spending the last night catching up with Meredith in the apartment, over a bottle of wine that we never got open because we couldn’t find an opener haha. It was really nice to see a long-time friend from home and update each other on the usual Medfield gossip. You know, who’s going to what college next year and which underclassmen are dating upperclassmen etc. Some good laughs.

Now I’m home! Been back for a few days now and it feels like Paris was a century ago. It has been a busy few days, as I’m trying to set up travel plans for spring break and April. Allie and my friends Emily and Larissa are coming up to the UK too, where I’ll be in London with Nick for a bit, and then we’re going all together to Dublin for a couple days, including Saint Patrick’s Day! Although, I heard it’s not a crazy holiday in Dublin but actually a religious one, so we might have to have our own American version of Saint Patty’s Day all by ourselves. So I’m getting stuff together for that, booking flights etc to and from Dublin and London, plus figuring out hostels to stay at and all the fun stuff. Some other exciting news: Brooke is visiting Florence this weekend, Carmel might be soon, and Eva just booked tickets to come for the last weekend of April!!! All my roomies coming to my city! I am SO excited to see all of them and cannot wait to see my bestest vanilla-face Eva in Florence instead of all grainy on Skype. Brooke is coming tomorrow and staying in a hostel with friends, so we’ll probably go out on Friday together (after me and Allie have a vino study session with our Italian class!). And there’s more! I’m going to Rome, the Vatican/Catholic center of the world, for Easter the second week of April. And best of all, Eva and her roommate and Nick are joining me there. We’re looking at cheap hostels to get near the city center. I am bursting at the seams to see the Colloseum! Should be such a fun weekend trip, and it’s only three hours from Florence to Rome by train, so easy as pie. Speaking of pie, I kind of miss pie – don’t have too much of that here…ha, well anyway, I have to go finish a pastel of the Florence skyline that I started in Art today. And take a nap, because me and the girls are going out to do karaoke tonight…oh boy. Peace!