- french food. i had the best lemon meringue pie of my entire life. also, the best croissant, but like... duh. my first night in paris i had a steak with bernaise sauce and a chocolate milkshake because i guess i wanted to be a stereotype of myself. over the course of the weekend i had 4 (count em) chocolate milkshakes for seemingly no reason. i even had a giant one instead of lunch one day. (i promised to never tell you about that mom, but cat's out of the bag.) now get this—french fries and french onion soup are actually french! this baffled me and i did not believe it until i had what is just called "onion soup" and it blew my mind. throw in some "fries" for dipping in all the extra cheese and i think i can safely say it was almost as good as michaels. downside? soup—15 euro.
- a homeless man tried to kill me. 2 minutes outside the train station immediately after arriving a homeless man grabbed me, held a wine bottle above my head and screamed at me. i pushed him away just before the bottle would have come crashing down resulting in my imminent death, and screamed, "you crazy, crazy frenchman." all the way to our hotel.
- art museums. the louvre is really beautiful and fancy but pretty much everything in it is overrated. the first thing that's overrated is the line. i was expecting a scene out of eurotrip where mimes harassed me for 7 hour while i stood in line to get into a glass pyramid. the actual line took approximately 4 minutes. (the line for the bathroom, however, was about 40.) yes, the art was beautiful, but there's just no room for any sort of creative interpretation. it was like, here is jesus. here is adam. here is lady liberty. here is jesus again. it's also crammed in there in a disorganized manner that resembles my closet. like there are three stories of paintings just layered on top of each other, so there's really no room for any peace or simplicity. the mona lisa was fun to see but she's behind bullet proof glass because apparently she is a bigger target for assassins than the president, so you can't really appreciate her fully. she's also tiny, like miniature, and alone on the biggest wall i have ever seen with barriers 20 feet around her. i had a front row seat and i still had to squint to see her. the centre pompidou was much more my style. it's pretty much exactly like MOMA except with a bunch of really famous matisse and dali thrown in. man ray and magritte are by far my favorite surrealist artists, and there was so much of them just thrown in with walls of blank canvases and sculptures made out of blow-up furniture that is was very exciting. i think i spent 20 minutes staring at magritte's painting that has a woman's face removed from her head in front of the ocean. (sorry i don't know what it's called but it's a classic.) we also went to musee d'orsay which was beautiful mostly because of the building. it's an old train station that's been converted into an art museum so the structure was just beautiful. they had i think 700 monet paintings, and while i'm not a big monet fan it was cool to see some impressionism so close up that it really does just look like a blur. there was also a giant van-gogh room, and that was the highlight. the bedroom is such an amazing painting in person even though it is very small. pretty much all the van gogh i've seen looks completely different in person which is always a pleasant surprise.
- my first real piece of art. i made an impulse buy at a gallery in montmarte and now i have some real art that deserves a frame and everything!
- the eiffel tower. you know what this is, there's not much to say except that it is not at all black, i'm not sure why it is black in every picture ever taken, but it is beige. it's also very exciting when it has it's little seizure of a light show every hour. also, while standing at the eiffel tower a french man came up to lauren and i and said in english, (this is an unaltered quote even though it may sound beyond belief,) "is this the eiffel tower? where is my kitchen!?"
- l'arc de triumph. climbed it. great view. ran across traffic in notoriously the worst traffic circle in the entire planet because we couldn't figure out that you have to take an underground passageway to get onto it's little island.
while paris was a blast and i'm so glad i saw what i saw and ate what i ate, everything was so crowded and fast that it was not the relazing parisian vacation i was hoping for. barcelona was much more my pace. very slow days, very fast nights pretty much spells out my ideal trip.
- the nightlife. i know it's tacky to love giant, obnoxious nightclubs with thousands of boozed-up twenty year olds grinding on each other, but i do, and i will not deny it. we also went to a shot bar which was more like a dessert/magic trick bar where every shot was either on fire, covered in whipped cream, or both. some of the highlights were: a "boyscout" where they lit the bar on fire, you roasted a marshmallow, and then dipped it in your shot. a "harry potter" where your shot has a cinnamon sugar covered orange on top of it and then they just light everything on fire again. and throw more cinnamon at it to make it spark. a "monica lewinsky" which i will not describe because my parents read this blog. and something that i don't remember where they do a chemical reaction and then you drink alcohol infused air out of a straw. since everything is either on fire or crammed with candy it is hard to get drunk at this place, so we got to try about 10 of these fun shots each without any signs of stumbling.
- the gaudi. pretty much everything worth seeing in barcelona is built by the architect gaudi, and there's really no way to describe it. it's innovative and surreal, and he uses a method called organic architecture (tom could have made this up) to make things look natural and beautiful and sandcastle-like.
- the american chain restaurants. overt your eyes if you think it is despicable to even look at american food while in europe, but i treated myself to starbucks and pizza hut because they are luxuries that do not exist in rome.
- the spanish boys. i met a beautiful guy named antonio who will make me his wife when i learn enough spanish and he learns enough english to be able to hold a conversation about anything besides soccer.
- the beach. yes, perhaps it was only about 50 degrees last week in barcelona. but that didn't stop tom, jess, ethan and i from diving into the freezing mediterranean sea and watching the sunset soaking wet and shivering in bathing suits on the beach. we looked like idiots and people were screaming egging us on and probably saying "morons" in spanish, but it was a damned good time.
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