Paris

So, last weekend, I went to Paris with friends Lindsay, Elyse, and Danielle. We caught a 10 o'clock overnight train on Friday, so we celebrated the first minutes of Elyse's 21st birthday on the staircase of our double-decker train with a gigantic brownie Dani had brought. The train was pretty packed, and we got scolded by a man in our car for whispering too loudly. We got to Paris around 7 or so the next morning, and it was freezing--at least, much colder than we had anticipated--but we walked around for a while until things opened, and we got some great pictures since the sun was just coming up.
View of the Seine
There were workers out putting up these awesome murals all along the riverbank and the sides of the bridges. Elyse recognized the artist (JR) and showed me some other pics of his work after we got back. He is worth checking out.
Here's a picture inside Shakespeare & Company, a really cool English bookstore, where there are upstairs reading rooms and a piano to play.
It's been there since the 50's and is known for being frequented by writers like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Notre Dame, which I'd been to before of course, but it was cool to see again. There was a guy having a lesson on the organ there while people were visiting. Dani was super jealous.
We went up to the top of the Tour Montparnasse for a view of the city. Here's the Jardin de Luxembourg. I only remember going up the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe the first time I was in Paris, so it was fun to see the view from somewhere else.
Danielle, Lindsay, and Elyse
Sacré Coeur. Notre Dame is really pretty, but I actually think I like Sacré Coeur better. The architecture is more open, and there are beautiful stained glass windows in bright colors. Unfortunately, you can't take pictures inside. It's also on top of a hill, which makes for a really nice view--I should have posted a picture of that, whoops--
and the streets below have quaint restaurants and shops.
Our hostel was in a really great location, and it had an awesome courtyard.
Plus, our room came complete with sleeping nook, which Lindsay claimed
Moving on to what was probably the coolest part of the weekend...Saturday night was Nuit Blanche (white night), an annual event in Paris when many museums and other sites are open until 7 am, and everything's free! There are art expositions in parks and cathedrals too. There are Nuits Blanches all over Europe, but I assume the one in Paris is one of the biggest.

This picture is in a pavilion in the Jardin de Luxembourg. The wheels spun, making a really cool shadow show. We went back to Notre Dame, where there was a documentary about the cathedral playing, and also to the Musée Cluny, the museum of the Middle Ages. At about 2:30, Lindsay and Danielle decided to call it a night, but Elyse and I stayed out a little longer and hit a few more spots.
Over the lake in the Jardin de Luxembourg, there was a giant disco ball that had pieces chipped out of the mirrors, so the fragments of light cast on the water and the chateau were interesting shapes. It was so pretty. This picture doesn't do it justice at all. We were there for a while, just watching that.
The were all kinds of light displays too. This one was in a gazebo in the Jardin de Luxembourg, but there was something similar going on in almost all of the cathedrals we went to.
Cherub projection in St. Merri that fluttered up and down with a recording of a poem. You can't really tell here, but it's distorted so that it has the torso and arm of a man but the rest of the body is childlike. It was kind of creepy.
There are always candles to be lit, but they look even cooler in the nighttime. Also in St. Merri, I think. At about 4, things were really dying down, and closing down, even though they were supposed to be open for three more hours, so we decided to head back and get some sleep so we could take advantage of Sunday too.
Opera Garnier. Something was going on inside, so we didn't get to see past the lobby, but hopefully there'll be a chance to do that when the whole program goes to Paris over Thanksgiving.
Centre Pompidou, the modern art museum. I hadn't been here before either, and since it was the first Sunday of the month, entrance was free to all of the museums too! We inadvertently chose the best weekend to go to Paris. The museum is huge, and I didn't really even make a dent in it, but the first floor has a lot of video, including a couple of works by Marina Abramovic, a performance artist we studied in my contemporary theatre class last spring. Fortunately, they were her less violent pieces. I'm not sure I could have handled watching the ones we talked about in class.
After Pompidou, we whiled away the rest of the day in Jardin de Luxembourg since the weather was so nice and we were all pretty exhausted.
There is such a funny variety of trees in that park. We had a leisurely dinner before getting on our train back, which was not nearly full, so we each had two seats to ourselves. Everyone passed out immediately, and then we thought we had missed our stop the next morning, but we woke up in time. The Marseille train station is really confusing, and we could never figure out how to catch the bus back to Aix. There's a train that runs from Marseille to Aix also, but they wouldn't sell us tickets because the bus was cheaper, and we walked all around the station, being redirected by tons of people, and eventually we payed the extra ten euro each for a taxi so people could make it back in time for their early morning classes.

All in all, it was a very good trip. I got to see a lot of places we didn't visit the first time I went to Paris, and I feel like I have a much better sense of the city "flavor," if you will, (kind of like the campus flavor?). We tried to go to the Catacombs, but they were closed due to vandalism. That was a disappointment, but perhaps they'll be open when we go back. I don't think there's anything scheduled besides trips to the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay, so there should be time for us to do things on our own too.