Europe, 2006 - 2007

I am sorry it has been such a long time and did not write. It has been. It has been very busy going all over Paris!

9-13-06 all of the way to 9-14-06 (no sleep)
We left Georgia at 4:30 and went on a 8 hour flight and when we arrived in Dusseldorf, Germany, it was already 7:00 A.M! Not long after that we rented a car and drove to Paris. On the way to Paris, we drove on the Autobahn, and in many places, there was no speed limit. I was very tired that day because if I slept it would end up ruining the entire trip with jetlag. The first hotel we slept in was not the best, it was very old and hot and my shower had a full length window that faced out onto a very busy street. It was frosted, but you could still see my shadow. Good thing I was in Paris, because nobody cared. That night for dinner we went to a Brasserie and had a long dinner.

9-15-06
The next day my family and I went to Versailles. Versailles is a famous palace that was built by Napoleon Bonaparte. It was amazing; all of the ceilings had wonderful paintings on them. My dad said that last time he was there his tour guide said if it looked like gold it probably was! So I guess there was gold everywhere! That night we went to a campground in the middle of Paris, right on the river Seine! There I met two of my pen pals; they are the daughters of people who work with my dad. They stayed with us for the entire weekend. It was great to finally meet Pen Pals that I have been writing to for almost a year!

9-16-06
We started the day with a tour of the Paris Sewers! It was very disgusting. It smelled horrible and there are rats down there! I learned to stay in school and make sure to get a good job, because there are people who have to work down in the sewers and I don’t want to be one of them. After that we went to the Eiffel Tower and climbed over 700 steps to the second floor and took the elevator to the top. The view was magnificent! We saw all of tourist attractions from the top and even though it was a cloudy day we could see everything, it was amazing! Then we had strange hot dogs and French fries with mayonnaise and ate them with a fork. From there we went to Monmarte and I had my picture drawn, it look OK when we were there, but the next day, it did not look anything like me. We also went to Socre Coure, inside it was hard to be quite because your footsteps echoed around everywhere, it was so big.

9-17-06
We got up in the morning, and went to church at Notre Dame. The rose window was better than any of the pictures of Notre Dame. There was stained glass everywhere, but the pictures of the windows did not come out. Now when I think of Notre Dame, I understand the word “breathtaking”. Before I thought it was just an adjective like “a breathtaking view” or “Amazing”, now I think of it as a verb, when you see something so beautiful you can’t breathe. After this I had to say goodbye to my friends, it was hard to let them go since I had only spent a couple of days with them. Then we went to the Louvre, that is the museum with the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. I was surprised by how small the Mona Lisa was, and my sister even had to ask “So, where’s the real thing”. My favorite part of the museum was seeing the Winged Victory. I found out that they took it down from a cliff that was overlooking the sea. Every angle you looked at it, it was beautiful.

9-18-06
We climbed the Arc de Triumph and had lunch on the Champs Ellysees, and when shopping at Saphorra, it is a big makeup store. Then we loaded back in the car and drove to Frankfurt Germany to meet up with people from my church.