Day 11

---

PARIS!! I've always wanted to go to Paris and now I can say I have! We woke up early and Arabella took us to the train station to ride to Paris from Strousburg. We rode on the TGV, a train which goes about 200 miles an hour. Yikes! After a couple of hours on the train, we arrived and hopped on to the Metro to get ourselves to the Eiffle Tower. It was fun/crazy because there were nine of us dropped off in Paris without a guide and told to go have fun. Well, we defintly did! We met up with another girl from SFA who was studying abroad in France, she helped us figure out what to do and got us around if we needed a translator. A boat tour around the city followed the Eiffle tower. We stopped the tour short though to eat lunch. The resaturant was a cute and very French little restaurant. We were there for a very long time though and the servers weren't very atttentive. I guess that goes back to the whole thing about how the French take time to enjoy their food. I just didn't know we'd need a few hours for that. After our long, relaxing lunch, we walked over to the Notre Dame and wandered around inside the incredible cathedral. We talked about what it would be like if that were the church we attended on Sundays regularly back in the day. Wow. We traveled over to the Louvre afterwards. That is one massive museum. We sat outside an looked around in aww at all the sites around the museum. Back on the metro we journeyed over to the Arc de Triumph. It was surrounded by a very busy and very hectic circle of traffic with no lanes. We just sat back and watched all of the almost wrecks happen. A walk down Champs de Lysee finished out that area for us. The shops around there were so expensive, but fun to pretend we were rich in. We headed to Montmart, the highest point in Paris for some drinks to end out our evening then back to the train station to ride back to Strousburg. A fun but exhausting day was a great way to gain confidence in ourselves to travel around by ourselves. I now trust myself to find my way around a foreign country without a guide.

---