My New Home

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I would describe today's activities, if I had the words. Unfortunately, I don't. We went to visit Versailles, I can tell you that much. I tried to impress upon the group how large everything there is beforehand and failed; I doubt I'll do much better here.

But let me attempt. For starters, the grounds are 800 hectares. For those of you at Northeastern: that's more than 27 times our campus. For anyone else: about 1500 American football fields (including touchdown zones). It's hard to image, really, without seeing it. It takes approximately an hour to walk from the Palace of Versailles to the opposite end of the cross-shaped Grand Canal. That's on the left side of the gardens. On the right side, you can try to head over to the Grand Trianon, the Petit Trianon, or Marie Antoinette's estate. If you have half an hour to get there. 15 minutes into her estate, you get to the queen's hamlet, which she built because she wanted everything to be English style. I felt a little like I was stepping into the Legend of Zelda, if you know what that is. Think about that. The queen wanted everything to feel English, so she built a small village.



The palace museum itself took us about an hour to get through. At my best guess, it covers perhaps 15% of the building. Then, of course, there are the amazing views of the fountains you can get while in the museum. Unfortunately, they were off today. Probably because running 620 water jets takes a lot of electricity and water.



Basically, the point is: Versailles and its grounds are huge and expensive. No wonder the French were minorly annoyed when Marie Antoinette decided to build a village to make the grounds more English. I mean, at least they didn't stage a revolution. Oh, wait...



Anyway, after Versailles, we went into the city to meet up again with Marie. We walked along the Seine for a bit and found a place we could get food to go so we could sit by the water. That took us up until about 9:15, which gave us just enough time to head over to the Eiffel Tower (and, of course, get more crêpes) before 10 to catch the lights show. From there, we headed back. I actually got super excited because one of the few random memories I retained from my last trip to Paris was a soccer game I saw on a surprisingly quiet street with a great view of the Eiffel Tower. We happened to walk past a soccer field that fit my memory exactly. It's a random and little thing, I know, but I thought it was cool because that memory is about a decade old.



By the time we got back to the hotel, it was 11:00 pm. Which was super awesome because our flight is at 7:30, which means we have to be out by 4:30. Plane naps will be in order. Onwards to the next city!

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