Weekend in Paris!

Twelve hours ago I was strolling through the streets of Paris eating a warm chocolate croissant (excusez-moi, pain au chocolat) and I still can't quite believe it. This weekend was a whirlwind adventure in Paris, and it was an absolute dream. To top it off, I got to spend it with the other two thirds of Nolemnah: Emilie Sabourin and Nolan Hudalla. NolEmNah... get it? It's cute. Or obnoxious. Either way, we don't care. We all had a super romantic weekend in Paris together... they tried to make it awkward for me, but that's just not possible anymore.

So here's how it went down...

Friday

First Parisian monument!

Nolan and I met Emilie in Paris on Friday...but we all arrived at different times. Nolan arrived early and met me at my bus station when I got in at 2ish. We were just a few blocks away from the Arc de Triomphe, so we decided to pop over there for a little sight-seeing. We looked it and walked around, but no way was I going to pay to walk up 200-some steps. Then we headed over to the hotel.

My hotel... but not my picture

Oh yeah, we stayed at a super sweet hotel. While Emilie was looking for hostels/apartments, she came across this deal where we could stay at a mystery 4-star hotel within a certain radius for a very reduced fee. We went for it, and ended up staying at a really nice Marriott that was just south of the St. Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. I'm surprised we ever got out of those beds...

My macaroon stash

Anyway... after I dropped my stuff off, we still had a few hours before we had to meet Emilie, so Nolan and I just wandered Northwards: we saw the Jardin du Luxembourg, a glimpse of the Panthéon, and decided to go in search of one of my chocolate stores. Gail Ambrosius, my "chocolate mentor" (from back in the day when I was in the chocolate business), gave me a few suggestions of chocolate stores in Paris, and we found one of them Friday night (we also passed a few others on the way with some crazy chocolate creations). Our destination, Ladurée, was a super classy little store, with a bunch of delicacies, chocolates, sweets, and the main attraction: the macaroons. I don't know exactly what I was expecting (probably something more like Gail's), but it was not quite this... they just looked like little cookies with cream in the middle. And there were only 2 or 3 chocolate flavors... how could they be that great? So I bought one (pure origin Columbian chocolate), and immediately changed my mind. It was one of the most surprising, decadent, amazing things I have ever tasted in my life... there were so many layers of chocolate! (Don't worry, I went back yesterday to get a box to take home!!)

The Louvre at night

After THAT wonderful experience, Nolan and I walked to the river and wandered into some plaza that turned out to be the Louvre. Paris at night: amazing. This turned into a common theme, every night we wandered around and every night we found beautiful amazing stuff.

Then we went to get Emilie at her train station, almost didn't find her, eventually found her, and went back to the hotel. We did more wandering around our neighborhood looking for something to eat, but everything was SUPER EXPENSIVE (as was all of Paris). We wanted to save our money for a nice dinner Saturday night, so we ended up having chinese food!

Saturday

We got ourselves up relatively early on Saturday and headed out on our northward route again, destination: the Musée du Louvre. On the way we stopped at Gail's other chocolate store suggestion, Pierre Hermé. In addition to beautiful sweets and chocolates, they had pastries, so I had to get myself a pain au chocolat for breakfast. I also got a chocolate-passionfruit macaroon to save for later...

1st chocolate croissant (aka: love of my lfie) in Paris

View of the Louvre across the river

Me and Venus

Next we went to the Louvre, and thanks to our "student/temporary European Union member status" we got in for free!!! Paris loves them students! The outside of the Louvre was literally awe-inspiring, it went on forever; the inside was equally as overwhelming. Of course we saw the big one, the Mona Lisa. We also saw Venus de Milo, Hammurabi's Code, and a ton of amazing works by italian, french and spanish painters, sculptures, egyptian works, etc! There was just so much art and so little time!!

Sacré-Coeur with Emilie!

Next stop: Montmartre. I didn't know a ton about Monmartre... but I knew the Sacré-Coeur and Moulin Rouge were there, and my parents loved it and Craig Ferguson loved it. (You don't know how many times Nolan and I wished we had Rick Steve's to tell us about what we were doing/seeing....). So we metro-ed ourselves up there (okay, the metro was nice, but it was confusing as hell compared to Madrid's), got some sandwiches and walked to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. We stood at the bottom of that hill, and looked up at that building, and it was amazing. Common theme here. The inside was pretty neat too. The top of the hill provided one of the best views of Paris, and it was here I decided to eat that passionfruit macaroon. Great decision.

Moulin Rouge: at the end of Sex Shop Boulevard

Then we walked down the street to the Moulin Rouge. It was on a very interesting street... and in the end we just stopped and took a picture. But still... the Moulin Rouge!!

After Montmartre I wanted to go to the Musée d'Orsay, but unfortunately I had lost my "cheat sheet" of museum and chocolate store times/prices/info, so we got there at 6:15pm and the museum had closed at 6pm. Dang. So we just walked along the Seine towards the Eiffel Tower as it got dark, and by the time we could see it, the entire Eiffel Tower was lit up and absolutely gorgeous! It soon started drizzling, so we quickly found ourselves a nice/reasonable restaurant and had a nice French dinner, steak and frites for me! 

Eiffel Tower at night

Sunday

Hall of Mirrors

After all of the walking of Friday and Saturday, I had blisters on the bottoms of both my feet. So I switched to my trusty gold sandals for the trip to Versailles. We thought we got ourselves up and going pretty early, but by the time we walked to the station and took the train out to Versailles it was almost 11am already. And boy were there a lot of people... it was like a mass migration. We got into the Palace for free again, but we still had to wait in the line to get in. It took a while. The inside of the palace was pretty amazing, so ornate and ridiculous! Why on earth was a building every so fancy??? There was one hall that was just full of enormous paintings of battles... whoa.

View of the never-ending "backyard" at Versailles

Then we got to the grounds... um, huge. There were so many different little gardens, fountains, statues, forests, and a huge canal. It was absolutely gorgeous, especially with the fall colors! I took so many pictures of pretty trees. At the other end of the grounds were two more "little" estates... so the King and Queen could escape that hard life in their main palace.

Pretty tree

I probably could have spent all day walking around those gardens, but we still had so much to see in Paris! By the time we got back into the city it was about 4pm so we made it to the Musée d'Orsay. We got in for free again, but we still had to wait in line. Fortunately we had a nutella crepe to help us through the line. Now, how can another little museum in Paris possibly compare to the Louvre? Good question. However, the Orsay holds a beautiful collection of Van Gogh, which alone probably would have been worth it for me. It also had a nice collection of Impressionists, such as Monet, Manet, Renoir and Degas; as well as some Toulouse-Lautrec works.

We couldn't take pictures in the museum, but we snuck one from one of the balconies

 Then we walked around and found ourselves some nice French-Italian pizza. We may have jumped the gun and settled for the first pizza place we found, and the service was questionable... but I got a carbonara pizza and I loved it. We wandered some more, walked around Notre Dame Cathedral, found the Latin Quarter, got some nutella ice cream, and stopped by the Panthéon again.

Notre Dame

This morning I headed back to Toledo solo, while Emilie and Nolan had one more day in Paris. Now they're headed to Nice (France), Barcelona, Málaga, and Emilie's coming to visit Toledo next Sunday!! Can't wait! Becca and I had a nice afternoon alone in Toledo... doing what we do best: eating... since no one else was here. I'm still kind of in awe at how amazing this weekend was... I did not want to leave Paris this morning! Who knew I would love it so much! Epic weekend, epic blog post, wrap it up. Okay, au revoir!