Paris

Basically... Long, kind of overrated, Eiffel Tower was awesome.

First Day
Train out of Amsterdam
nice train, comfortable ride. Kind of oddly reclining seats, they slid forward as the back reclined to give everyone in the back of you the same amount of leg room (presumably).

Got in, got on the metro and got to hotel at lunchish. The hotel kind of sucked. Great location, but other than that just annoying. no food in the rooms, no drinks in the rooms (of any kind, except perhaps water, which wasn't actually listed as an exception, but there were water cups so I'm assuming. The bathroom was incredibly, stupidly small. To the point where you had to sit on the toilet at an angle as the wall was too close to the front. The walls were thin, really really thing, you can hear people talking in adjacent rooms quite clearly. The beds were springy, as in you could feel springs, and there was only one long cylindrical pillow, though it was at least long enough that you could fold it in half to make a decent pillow with no problem. There was only one free electrical outlet in the room, and the only other was taken by the TV (which we never turned on). No ice machine again, no breakfast included. There was only one room key, which we had to leave at the front desk every time we left the hotel. One thing they did do well, however, was the provided map. It had a large city map with a list of museams, etc. and their locations, and the back had a subway map. The location of the hotel was circled on the large city map.

The only source of ventilation was a single window, which had no screen. This was fine when it was raining out (could easily leave open just enough to let a nice flow of air in without getting anything wet), but on the third day when it got warm/sunny out, and the window was still open, insects swarmed the room. I managed to fan most of them out with my jacket, but by then leaving the window closed the room got stuffy.

There was a wonderful crepe stand just outside the hotel. It was not terribly cheapt at 3-4 euro / crepe, but very good. I tried both plain chocolate (nutella actaully) and that + banana. It was fresh banana, peeled right as she made it, and the actually tortilla-y skin of the crepe was also made there fresh.

So the first day we got to the hotel, got right back out and wandered down the sciene (river, sp). We eventually figured out where the Eifel Tower is, which is a few blocks from the hotel, it was just somewhat of an issue to correctly situate outselves on the map. We did not go up the first day due to it being overcast and rainy, etc, but got pictures of the underside of the tower. There was an organized group dinner that night where we had fondue. The fondue was good, but what was notable about the restaurant was the wine - it was fairly medicore (at least compared to the wine I've had at home, which is pretty good, much better than what I've had as a student in NC), but it came in baby bottles. Seriously, baby bottles.

After the restaurant, we wandered through a large church near it, got some amazing pictures overlooking Paris (as it was in an elevated, outlying region of the city), and went to find the moulan rouge (we did not go in, it's like 100 euro / person, but got pictures of the outside), and randomly ran into a large group of students from Virginia Tech. We then found our way back to the hotel and a subset of us went into a cafe near the hotel for a few drinks. It was very expensive beer.

Due largely to said drinking the night before, I got a late start the next day. only seeing the Arc de Triomphe with Rob (who likewise got a bit of a late start). We ate dinner at the Horse's tavern (which, incidentally, is hugely better than the Horse Inn in Lancaster, PA). They are apparently famous for something called a Giraffe of beer. Our group ordered two giraffes of 1667 beer, split between about 4-6 students and the three professors. A giraffe of beer is 2.5L (about 12 beers we figured), it comes as a giant tube (hence the name, it's like the giraffe's neck) with a tap at the bottom. They were 40 euro / giraffe. As we were close to finishing one, the last beer got poored and was being passed back to Turkett, who asked why, to which the guy sitting nearest (and the poorer) said "Because drunk Turkett is fun Turkett." The food was also very good, I had a corque montessori, which was a hot open sandwich with ham and cheese, it came with a pretty bad salad, but was extremely good itself. It cost about 6 euro. Others had more legit entrees which were also very good (including muscles, of which I tried one and like it more than I would have expected). The fries that some people got were exelent (go figure the French can make French Fries). We went back to the Arc de Triomphe that night with a larger group, as Rob and I had nubbed out and missed all the signs explaining that you got to the center of the traffic circle via a tunnel, so we went into the middle, went up and the view then seemed incredible. After that back to the hotel and sleep to wake up early and get to The Lourve the next day.

As Rob and I slept through the Musay d'Orsay (sp) the day before, we had to show up early to the Lourve and try to get the museum passes. There were two groups going through with Peggy that day, one at 9 and one at 11, Rob and I were originally going with the 9 group, but it took us too long o figure out where to go / what to do in order to buy our passes, so we wandered aimlessly through a wing of French sculptures and tapestries for awhile then met up with the 11 AM group. In the hallway with the tapestries, there were a number of other toys and trinkets that had (I think) belonged to French nobles in the past. The most notable of these for me was an amazingly ornate chess set, which I don't have a picture of due to it being in a dark room and in a glass case (so no flash would work and not enough ambient light), it was beautiful though.
The Art history class at 11 with Peggy was well worth going to. It's rare that you can go through a world class museum with an expert in the field, and while we only hit a very very small portion of hte Lourve with her, actually getting the context of many of the paintings and sculptures was extremely interesting.

One thing about the Lourve that I really didn't realize until I started wandering around was the sheer size of the place. It is enormous, amazingly so. You could wander for days and not see everything, it's room after room after room, all different - wings share a theme but rooms are differentiated, the collection spans from Ancient Egypt to modern times (or close to it). Some notable works of art that we saw include the Mona Lisa (which was in a room with a lot of other art, I had thought it was off in it's own room), the room it was in was also much brighter than I'd expected. I tend to agree with Peggy in that it is very overrated, many of the other works seemed much more impressive, both in their size and what they depicted. The other work that I actually recognized from before was the Venus de Milo, a famous Greek statue of Venus which has been damaged substantially over the years (arms missing). After the class Rob and I wandered over to the Ancient Egyptian section, which was interesting though there was little that felt particularly unique or impressive compared to what was covered during the class.

While wandering out of the Lourve we met up with the professors, etc. and split tot hte respective museums for the other classes. The CS class went to the Museum of Arts & Measures, a king of history of invention and machines. I found it fascinating, especially some of the old computers. They had a a Cray 2 (from 1985), and IBM 71xx (06 perhaps?), and an Apple Lisa most notably. Another notable exhibit was a Foucault Pendulum, which is the same thing that they had at Delbarton (a private school near my home-town for anyone who doesn't know). The idea is that the pendulum is long enough that the Earth actually rotates under it, causing it to very slowly move around the outside of a circle, which makes it usable as a clock (the pendulum will knock little things over every so often, so if you space them right it'll come out to work as a clock).

After the museums, Turkett and I went to an internet cafe briefly, was a bit sketchy, but I checked email, facebook, and briefly the forsaken website - they have not downed anyone new yet from what I could tell. No notable mail, etc. Then I went back, slept for a bit, and had a picnic in front of the Eiffel Tower with Wes, Catherine, and Joe, afterwards we went up. I lost at noses and was stuck carrying the huge bag of crap left over from the picnic when we went up in the tower. The Eiffel Tower was amazing, we got up to the top about half an hour before sunset. Sunset was one of the most beautiful sights I've seen in a long, long time. The view of the city was likewise amazing. I've been up the Empire State Building in NYC, which is taller, but everything around it is, while shorter by notable amounts, closeish - nothing else remotely near the tower is close to it in height. You can see forever. It reinforced something I'd been noticing about Paris, it's a big city by being low but just going forever. Wes and I got separated from the other two just after we got to the second level of the tower, and they went down fairly quick we figured out later, but wes and i stayed up for like 1.5+ hours until it was legitimatly dark. The Arc de Triomphe, which seemed so huge when we were there - and was much much larger than I'd expected, looked like a little toy from the top of the tower.

Then it was sleep that night, the next day we got up early and hit up Versailles. It was a waste of time. Hugely underwhelming. The palace was an endless series of over the top decorated sitting rooms/drawing rooms/etc with pictures of French Nobility, every once in awhile you'd hit a room that looked more or less the same but with a bed in it. The hall of mirrors was a long hallway with some dingy, misty mirrors, some chandeliers and a few statues of unidentified people. The gardens were huge and repeditive, and not that impressive before they started repeating. Lots of (fairly poorly maintained) gravel roads lined with trees that have branches cut into weird shapes. Nothing was impressive except the size of the gardens, which wasn't even that impressive as they aren't maintained that well (at least at this point).

After we got back from Versailles we hit up the catacombs, which were hugely interesting. The whole thing was well ventilated - very cool, and once we got into the actual catacombs part there were an amazing number of bones, just stacked, some in patterns, most just in orderly piles, mortared into place. The were huge, it went on for something like 1.3 miles all said and done. After catacombs it was all reading, sleeping and a little eating. Wandered around with wes and took some more pictures, then woke up and got on a train. This train ride was amazingly beautiful once we've gotten into Switzerland in the Alps and with the lakes and whatnot.