Paris, France - June 24th

Today brought the most beautiful weather thus far. It was warm and sunny. We got an early start in order to beat the crowds to the Louvre. It paid off as we didn’t run into any lines and had no problems getting a front row view of Mona. This museum puts any other art collection to shame. Any artwork taken from here would be the main attraction at an art exhibit back home. We spent hours walking through the French, Italian, and Spanish paintings, the Egyptian artifacts, Roman and oriental statues. After the Louvre we ate lunch at a nearby restaurant where Dad and the owner jokingly argued over which coffee is real; our big cups or their little espressos. From there we went to the San Chapel. The line for this chapel was about a 40 minute wait, and they were charging to get in so we decided to skip it and instead board the hop on- hop off bus again, despite our tickets expiring the day before. We took one last round of the entire city. The weather was much nicer than it had been before so the city was in a new light. At the end of the day the five of us returned to the hotel to make arrangements for the rest of our trip.

In the evening, the parents went to bed early so they could wake up in time to catch their flight home, while Wade, Geoffrey, and I went out to find some night life. Geoffrey’s high school friend, Ty, had told us of a few places to try and our number one place was the Frog and Princess. So we hopped on the subway to the section of town where we hoped to find the pub. Once we got off at our stop it took some walking around and asking a few Frenchmen to get to where we wanted to go. As we approached the entrance to the pub, we were confronted by a few black bouncers who wanted to see our IDs before we got in. Geoffrey had left his in the hotel and the bouncer said I had to be 21 to enter. So we turned around and walked a few feet across the street into a much more lively Irish pub whose name I can’t remember. The guys behind the bar all spoke English with an Irish accent. We started with a round of beers, followed by a few rounds of shots, and then more beers. Three of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen sat down at a table next to ours and Geoffrey began talking to them. They were from Ireland, studying in Paris. We talked to them for quite some time before they got up to meet their friends at another bar. We decided to stay where we were and shortly after they left two girls sat down at another table near us. Geoff and I tried talking to them, but they were French and knew very little English. It was getting late by this time and since we didn’t want to oversleep we headed back to the room and fell straight asleep.