"That's so hipster!"

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

–Ernest Hemingway

This quote pretty much immortalizes my changed view on Paris, a city I completely fell in love with unexpectedly. Not only that, but this was probably one of my most epic weekends thus far. But lets start off talking about Zurich, our pit stop for a night before moving onto the city of light.

Zurich may make a mean gin and tonic (Would you like some tonic with that glass of gin?), but it pretty much bankrupted me and the Swiss guy we ended up hanging out with kept smacking me in the head instead of high fiving me like everyone else. Oh, and I spent 11 francs (the equivalent to the dollar’s exchange rates) on McDonalds. Plus one of our friends pretty much puked all over the city the next day before our train. Once in Paris, It took us about two hours to navigate to where our hotel was and how to figure out the metro system, so we didn’t get to our hotel Friday night until around 10 pm, so the four of us decided to quickly change and try to meet up with some of our friends that were also in Paris at the same time, so we got hot dogs in a park we walked through, and met up with our friends at Dupliex Club, and had an amazing time (albeit we accidently walked into an gay bar for the older Parisian crowd). Without even realizing it, we were dancing away until after 4 AM.

We woke up early Saturday morning and walked up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and bought 10 euro glasses of champagne to toast to our rockstar lifestyles, ate breakfast crepes, checked out Notre Dame, and then spent the remaining part of the afternoon exploring the Louvre. We went shopping at H&M so we could have going out outfits, and made plans with Daniella to go drink wine under the Eiffel Tower and go clubbing on a boat.

Sunday night I was able to meet some French guys who I left the club with, and we walked around Paris for hours having good conversation. I think sometimes this might mean I am a wanderer, or that I just love making new friends. It probably was dangerous, but they were very nice! I learned several useful French phrases through them and was able to see a lot of Paris that I wouldn’t have been able to if I hadn’t gone with them. One thing I did notice about France is that I can categorize most of the French into two categories: people who hate everyone (or at least anyone who doesn’t live in Paris) and people who are curious.

And good advice that I may or may not one day delve into one day if you don’t want to get back to your dormitory at 4:30 AM: Don’t miss your train because your friends have your reservations and all the other trains are booked because you thought it’d be cool to see Paris during Bastille week. But for now I’m in a sleeper train heading toward the crazy city of Amsterdam with pretty much everyone in our program, deathly afraid of getting bed bugs (Pray for me! Haha.)