Sin dormir

Alas, I write the first post about the trip. sorry its taken me a few days...my procrastination + realizing i actually am taking five spanish courses is not a good combo. ANYWAYSSSS


so as we were planning this trip, we found these 60 euro round trip tickets on RyanAir. i dont know if any of you have heard of this airline (i hadn't before i came here..) but its basically this ridiculously cheap airline that flies around europe but they have really weird baggage requirements and are realyyyy strict about them aka no checking bags and you cant have more than one carry-on. not like a carry on and a purse. just the carry on. and it cant weigh more than 22 lbs (they weigh it). i digress

so besides weird baggage requirements ryan air also has a knack for flying into weird airports so its not just a cab ride away to the center of whatever city. in order to be wise & frugal, we decided to take a 4 hour bus ride to Barcelona at like 6pm, with our friend Anahi who's studying there this semester, and take our 8am flight to paris. since we were only in barc for less than 12 hours, we figured it would be best if we just went out and stayed out until our flight.

bad. idea.

anahi took us to this really hoppin bar near her place owned by these 3 local boys who have the bar "for fun" and have real finance jobs during the day. not a bad gig if i do say so myself. anyways so when 4:30am rolls around, everyone decides they're hungry and we stroll over to a bakery (europe is the BEST for latenight!), grab some pastries (Jean got a tuna melt......) and decide we have just enough time to take a 45 minute catnap before catching a cab to the airport.
an hour later....everyone wakes up from beds, floors, chairs, etc in a tizzy (is that a word?) throwing stuff in their bags and trying to look semi-decent. we hop in a cab and phewww made the flight!

look at those veggies!

after the flight, shuttle, and a cab, we got to check into the hostel. the first thing we wanted to do was eat (typical) so we mozied (sp?) into a rando restaurant and got food. first of all i just have to say that all the french people we met (minus the one waiter who told me and zoe that people will respect us more if we call coffee a "creme" instead of "café au lait") were soo nice. they obvi could tell we were americans but they were so patient with us and nice! So since my diet in espana has been seriously lacking in the vegetable department (see previous posts), i decided to get a salad...best. decision. ever. it had every type of veggie i could ask for and CORN! (sorry aleesh) i miss corn!!! ugh it was delish and all the salads in france have this mustard-y dressing that is divineeee. since café con leche converted into café au lait this weekend, i obvi had to try many. after lunch we wanted to hit the town and do some sightseeing since it was still early so we started walking. i know it's really cliche to say this but paris is like literally sooo beautiful. it's exactly like every movie you've seen with paris in it. the streets are soo cute and there is a crepe man on every corner (heaven!). i stopped every chance i could..woopsiessss..on the way to the notre dame. lucky for us the weather was sunny and perfect that day so pics turned out really nice! (see fbook for more). i couldn't stop thinking about quasimoto hangin off the roof when we there haha but it was really cool.

then we ventured over to a little building called the Louvre - probs one of eliz's faves - which is really too big to see the whole thing in one day but we def hit the hot spots: Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Winged Victory of Samothrace, Napolean's apartments.  we went back to the hostel, showered/changed, and went to a small place by our hostel for dins and it was deliciousssss. i got this salad with three pieces of toast and on each toast they had a phenom big hunk of cheese: mozzarella on one, brie on one, and goat cheese on the last. yummy in my tummy. we were contemplating going out afterwards but thought it would be best if we slept a little considering it had been like 36 hours and we had a full day planned for sightseeing on saturday!

More tomorrow! :)