let's (not) go (to the louvre)

hey everyone! sorry its been a while since i've written. i've been very busy with loads of work from my tutorials. it's hard getting a breath of air in between nietzsche and st. paul, let alone a chance to write a blog. dani is here visiting me for 2 weeks on her way to south africa, which is pretty sweet, but unfortunately she leaves this saturday. last weekend was our anniversary and being that we were together, we decided to go where else, but the city of love.. paris. dani got in saturday morning at 7am. i picked her up from the airport, we ran over to salters with what seemed like 500 pounds of luggage... salter was nice enough to let her leave her bags there while on our trip. We had enough time till our train left to spend the afternoon with him. We ate at wagamama's, an awesome asian/noodle bar. it was my first time in the chunnel, so i didn't know what to expect. needless to say, pretty cool, hassle free, and not as scary as I thought (considering you're traveling below an ocean). once in paris we unloaded our stuff at the awesome and very central apartment we stayed in, and walked down the street for the start of what would be a weekend of great, but expensive french food. (we had enough croque monsiers to feed a small village... and i've never seen a country that likes eggs and cheese so much. they seem to put both of them in just about everything they can). over the course of the weekend we did all the big stuff, plus more- we went to the eiffel tower (both during the day and at night), ice skated on/in the eiffel tower- and the best part was that it was free! we had amazing views and it was uber fun. we also went to the top of the arc de triomph (again sweet views), walked down the champs d'elysse, went to versailles (which is massive to say the least), went to church at notre dame, went to the top of the towers there and saw the famous rose windows and gargoyles, saw the famous and not so grandiose moulin rouge (actually in a sketchy part of town), saw the remnants of bastille, went to the latin quarter to this cool place called barrio latino, and we went to the musee d'orssay. everything seems peachy right? Seems like we got everything in? well untill some rather unfortunate events along the way... in my let's go book it says the louvre is open monday nights till 10pm. thinking that instead of wasting the day and nice weather indoors at the louvre, we decided to go monday night. we get there around 6pm, ask someone where we can buy tickets and he tells us it closed at 5:30. closed?! they are only open wed and fri nights. and the worst part is they don't open on tuesdays (the day we left). so no louvre or mona thanks to the writers of lets go... bummer. on another high note- on our way out of the bastille subway stop some subway regulators (about 7 of them) were standing in our way to exit, checking that everyone had vaidated subway tickets that proved they payed for their ride. Now- the twenty something other times (literally) we had already ridden the subway in this city we never needed our validated tickets exiting, so we had just thrown away our old validated ones. for some reason they were checking them at this particular moment (just our luck). now it doesn't really make sense to me because we had bought 10 packs and had the rest of our unvalidated tickets with us proving we werent jipping the system, but the lady wasn't having it and we got fined 25 euros each. lucky we even had unvalidaded tickets on us because if you didnt have any tickets on you the fine could be up to 70 euros each. so that was a pain, but we tried to not let it ruin our trip. we still had an amazing time, and loved paris. its pretty awesome, and the parisians we came across were nothing like the reputation they generally have towards americans... everyone was nice and some even tried teaching us/bettering the little french we tried...on our way back from paris our train was delayed, but we did get a free sandwhich from this really nice guy working in the restaurant cart of the train...all in all it was an amazing trip and dani and i loved paris. i loved being in the city of love with my lover!