THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM

I'm finally back in the hotel room and it's been over 18 hours since we've left. It's been such a long day/night, and I'm honestly so incredibly thankful I went abroad because I love this beautiful city so much. I got to meet up with Will again today, and he took us to Versailles as our "unofficial" tour guide (being it his day off from Manny-ing). It's actually quite easy and cheap AF to get to Versailles from Paris. If you take the metro (as we did), it's only a short 30 minute trip and costs you less than 5 euros to get there and back. If you're a citizen of the EU (which we weren't) you get free basic entry to Versailles, which includes admission to the palace and its surrounding grounds (we paid 15 euros, still not bad).

Versailles is beautiful.

On another note, you can kinda tell why the French people wanted to axe murder King Louie and his family so badly. ALL GOLD ERRYTHANG, like GOLD gates, GOLD ceilings, GOLD walls, GOLD mirrors, GOLD bed sheets, GOLD doors, etc. Like don't mind me or my poor starving family working in the fields while you lounge on your chaise bed with a plate of grapes that are spoonfed by one of your mistresses. There's a huge display of wealth at the Palace of Versailles, and it makes you wonder what the place looked like back in the day, decked out in all its grandeur. Also, since the king and queen had separate bedchambers, it also makes you wonder at how thin those walls were.

The Hall of Mirrors was one of the coolest rooms I've ever seen. But first.....

This is where they signed the Treaty of Versailles that ended the first World War. It's crazy when you think about how much time was put into the creation of this palace. Almost every single room has a vaulted ceiling with a different scene from Greek/Roman mythology painted upon its surface based on its theme (Mars room, Venus room, Diana room, etc). King Louie was a big fan of those cherubs.

If you have time to spare, I would definitly check out the outside grounds. We didn't stick around for too long just because there was a lot of construction, but this place is huge!! The palace covers over 800 acres of land and the gardens are still beautifully maintained.

We decided to go back to Paris for lunch and stumbled upon this amazing little bistro down a random alleyway. If you're traveling Europe on a budget, I would defintely recommend checking out some of the prix-fixe meals they have around lunch time. Depending on the café, you could end up paying 10 euros or less for an appetizer, entree, and dessert combo or an entree and a beer combo. All the food here has been amazing so far, and free bread comes with pretty much everything so you can't go wrong.

After lunch, we walked to the Pont des Arts, or "Love Lock Bridge". It's a really cool tradition where lovers engrave their first names onto padlocks, attach them to a section of the bridge together, and then throw keys away into the Seine river below as a sign of their eternal romance. Kind of icky and Notebook-esque but the tourists looove it. This tradition actually collapsed a bridge in Paris last summer from the weight of all the locks. The mayor, Anne Hidalgo, is now encouraging selfies instead. However, it's still a neat idea, and I may or may not have padlocked my parents' names onto a section of the bridge myself. Oops.

Our last stop of the day was the Eiffel Tower. My first impression of the monument was that it's a lot smaller than you think. However, upon closer inspection, and after 20 minutes of climbing up the steps, it begins to dawn to you just how large it actually is.

We decided to climb up the steps to the top because YOLO, and it was such a cool experience that we are only so young for so long to do. We got to the top of the first platform, and to our surprise, they had constructed an ice rink that you could rent skates (for free!) to enjoy. It was such an amazing experience and kind of terrifying at the same time. You could see the ant people below the tower, and they looked quite miniscule in comparison to yourself. I had the worst vertigo for awhile before being able to move normally again. Afterwards, we kept climbing up to the next viewing platform. It was such an amazing view of Paris that I'll remember forever .We went just in time for them to turn on the lights, so we got to watch the sun set in Paris from the amazing vantage point of the Eiffel Tower.

It's been an amazing three days in Paris, and I can't believe there's still so much to see and do. I'm going to go out to the bars now so I'll report back more later, but for now, this trip has been flaaaame.

#Versailles #selfies #EiffelTower #LoveLocks #drunk #paris