Versailles

Yesterday was probably the busiest day we had. We started by sleeping through our 8:00 train kind of on purpose, and catching a train to Versailles around 8:45 after getting a few pastries at a nearby bakery. The ride was only about 30 minutes long and we were the very last stop so it wasn't a problem trying to figure out when to get off. We had coffee and hot chocolate at a cafe and then walked towards the Versailles Chateau.

Wow, I thought that kind of palaces only existed in fairy tales. It was so pretty that it was surreal. There was a huge line that we did have to stand in, but it probably only half an hour, so it wasn't too bad. We used our handy-dandy little audio guide and it helped us find the really cool things about the palace. All the rooms were so....... royal? I guess they were beautiful but, as my mom pointed out, they weren't very cozy, but they were still super cool. I don't have pictures today again because my wifi wasn't working.

After we finished our audio guide, we got some lunch and ate it in the gardens behind the chateau. The "gardens" were beautiful. There were fountains and hedges and a lake. Ahhhhh, it was so nice. I can't believe it all belongs to one single person. We rented five bikes and went to a different part of the palace that was in a different part of Versailles. It was Marie Antoinette's special land place thingie. We visited her little getaway house. (Haha, house, more like a mansion) and then went to the place where she played Peasant. Apparently, she had always longed to live the "simple life of a peasant," the fake life of a peasant, and so she had people build a special little village and she would go there and pretend she was a peasant. There were farms and gardens and she even had her own peasant house. The traditional kind with three floors and a fancy dining hall. ;) The houses she had built were really cute, though, and they had animals in the places where she had animals. They had a peacock who, at the moment, had it's quills up showing off, and it was really cool! They also had goats and one came up to the fence just close enough so I could pet it. I really like it but the idea of Marie Antoinette making it her ginormous doll house was just plain weird.

We returned our bikes and took the train back to Paris. We went straight to the Eiffel Tower because we had been planning to go up it since the day before. We did have to wait in line, even for the stairs, but it proved to only be about a 25 minute wait. We had a race to the top but we all kind of got distracted on the first and second floor. In the next blog I hope I can make a section of photos for this blog because it was just so awesome.

Anyway, we climbed up the first two sections of the Eiffel Tower. We had no choice but to take the elevator up to the very top. We got to the top and the sun had just set. The view was breathtaking. We were at the top when the lights turned on and when the hourly sparkling light show started. We spent some time up there and then went down in time to see the light show from the grassy park. We went to a cafe around 12:30 and were surprised to see that there were still people there, many people. We had dessert and took the metro which was still open and walked, zombie-like, back to our hotel. I fell asleep immediately after falling asleep, because it was about 1:30 am when we got back. But, yesterday was one of my favorite days, and I hope the next few will be just as good.