An Explorer In Rome: Paris for Easter: Part 1

This past weekend, for Easter, I went to Paris...to see my family!!! My mom, brother, sister, and my mom's best friend came to see me! It was very nice of them to do that, considering it is very expensive to fly to Europe. And my siblings missed school for me. I'd never do that. But my mom also brought me over some goodies (ie. cookies, candy. pretzels, my yo-yo, etc) and some birthday presents from my friends!! Thanks friends for the cards and candy and books and CD's!

Anyway, after a rocky start (Air France left us sitting in FCO for an hour so I arrived later than I expected to Paris), things began to look up. I didn't get lost going to our apartment. Usually, I don't look up specific directions and wing it so then I get lost, but this time I didn't! Our apartment was in Montmartre, right near the Sacre-Coeur. On Thursday, we went to the Eiffel Tower and climbed a lot of steps to the second level. Nice views but I definitely would have been scared if we went all the way to the top. For dinner, we just went to the grocery store to get food. We had early nights all week because of long days being out.

Friday, we went to the Louvre. The collection is huge! The only painting I really wanted to see was "Liberty Leading the People," but it wasn't there! Ridiculous. Jimmy and I explored what we could in a short amount of time before we all met up again for lunch. We then walked along the Seine to Notre Dame. We snuck in the mass entrance, bypassing the whole line (on Good Friday, nonetheless!). After, we went to Pere Lachaise cemetery (I needed my dose of dead people in Paris). It was huge, but we saw Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Both graves were blocked off by fences because of crazy fans who go crazy over those two guys. Wilde's grave had a glass wall, but where it ended (6 feet up), I saw lipstick kisses. That's devotion. For dinner, we went to an Italian place. Pretty much the whole trip I used Italian instead of French. Oh well. Except for when I bought a train ticket in the Rome airport today, I said "merci." Oops.