Portgual!

Portugal was really great! Let me tell why. First of all, it made it a thousand times more enjoyable that we were able to stay with a missionary couple. Not a hostel. I'm so sick of hostels. Elder and Sister Lund were so good to us. Too good. When we got off the plane at around 8 at night, she had spaghetti, salad, and different breads waiting for us. It tasted soooo good. American food! She made us dinner every night, even though they were off doing missionary stuff! She'd put something in the crock pot for us to eat. It was so nice and saved us money.

Secondly, Taylor (Camilia's fiance) is living there this semester and he took us around. It was so nice to just follow someone who knew what he was doing. To not have to plan out routes and metro stops was nice!

Here we are eating after we got in that first night. Their apartment was huge. It was a whole floor of a building. There were enough beds for all of us except one. So I volunteered to sleep on the couch, which was actually very comfortable to me.

The next day (our first full day) we went to Sintra, a town a little north west of Lisbon. We rode a bus up a mountain to see ruins of an old Moorish castle. There was also a palace up the mountain that looked like a Disney castle. It was one of the coolest palaces I've been to.

There was a beautiful view of Sintra and the ocean.

Disney Palace!

Then we just wandered around the city a bit. Portugal is famous for its painted tiles, it's on all of the buildings and it's so pretty. The sidewalks and squares also had cool mosaic stone patterns, as seen below.

Sorry for some of the weirdly lightened pictures. A lot of them turned out dark for some reason. I also didn't bring my nice SLR cause I was just sick of carrying it around. My other camera takes duller photos I think. But luckily my phone takes more vibrant pictures. Wow, that makes me sound ridiculous.

Pigeons just really love this monument!

View from a really big old elevator we rode. I loved all the orange house tops. So pretty, and it felt so Portugal to me! Fun to be somewhere with so much warmth and color.

Lisbon also has cool old trolleys. We rode one. The elevator and the trolley both came included on our metro pass. Score!

Trolley ride!

From the top of the elevator.

Last day in Paris

On the last day we climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe and looked out at the city and the Champs-Elysees. It was a clear and beautiful day. After that we went to the Catacombs! I'd heard of these and was glad we were going. They were morbid. Walls lined with skulls. But I thought they were cool in a creepy way.

In front of the Louvre.

I don't really know how to act for pictures in front of dead bodies.

We ended the day with a nice sit by the Seine!

Now I'm off to Lisbon!

Pere Lachaise Cemetary

On Thursday morning we went to the Pere Lachaise Cemetary. Many famous people are buried here including Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Jim Morrison, Gertrude Stein, and Delacroix. I read that it's the most visited cemetary in the world. Aside from these famous people, it's just a really cool cemetary. It's almost like a little village, with a lot of the tomb stones being big, or like little buildings. And of course I loved the leaves on the ground. As we were leaving I saw a man raking them and I wanted to tell him to stop!

Some of the graves had grotesque sculptures by them. I think this was a holocaust memorial. One grave had a sculpture of a decaying skeleton on it. Kind of creepy. Here's my professor John in front of one.

We wanted to see Oscar Wilde's grave and some came only for that. And like usual, this is what it looked like when we got to it. John said that women kiss his grave, and there's lipstick marks all over it. So a couple girls kissed the tarp instead! I hope it started a chain of tarp kisses. (John also tried to take the tarp off and look inside! He's such a rebel).

Gertrude Stein

Jim Morrison. Lots of flowers.

Chopin

See! A little village.

Night at the Museum

We finished off Wednesday at the Louvre. It's open late, until 9:45, on Wednesdays. It was one of the coolest things we did. There was relatively no one there! I heard in the day time it is packed. We were able to see some of the most famous pieces with no one else in the room! Unheard of! It was eerily awesome. I loved it.

Winged Victory. I love love this one. It was just found on a cliff somewhere. No one even knows who the sculptor was.

Venus de Milo. We were literally in this room alone. Except for a couple Asian people.

I can just imagine this being packed in the day. But maybe I don't know.

With my by myself...

Oath of the Horatii- Jacques Louis David

Michelangelo's slaves

Code of Hammurabi

We walked across the entire Louvre (and it's massive with a capital M) to see Vermeer's "The Lacemaker" and of course this is what we found.

Regardless, great way to end a birthday!

Sacre Coeur

After Versailles we went to Sacre Coeur, a beautiful basilica that stands above Paris. It's white and has a gorgeous view. We went at sunset, and it was perfect. You can also see Sacre Coeur whenever you're up high in central Paris. I could see it from the Musee d'Orsay, the Pompidou, and the Arc de Triomphe. Every time I thought about how I was looking up at someone at Sacre Coeur, and they were looking back at me.

As Brooklynn said, the sun was kissing the city.

And a birthday crepe for dinner! Haha. It was ham, cheese and egg. "Crepe Complet." So good.

Versailles Pt. II

So our third day in Paris was also my birthday, and the one thing I wanted for my birthday was to ride bikes in Versailles. Some girls from our program had gone the day before and said they hadn't seen any bikes, but it had also been raining. I was holding out hope. When we got there I didn't see anyone on bikes as my friend Katie and I wandered the gardens. We had walked around quite awhile, all the way up to Marie Antoinette's weird village, and had seen no bikes. We left the village about an hour before we were supposed to meet up with our little group of friends. By that point I had just accepted that I wasn't going to get to ride bikes. That I'd have to come back some other time in my life because I really wanted to ride through those gardens. I didn't want that, cause I was already there, right then! I also figured that it would be just my luck, and the friends we were meeting would have found them, and we wouldn't have. As we were getting back to the main part of the gardens, we see our friend Brooklynn. ON A BIKE! She says, "Go get one! I just barely rented this!" I had a short pause though, because we didn't have that much time before we were supposed to meet our other friends outside the palace, and I hate being late and making people wait. But I said, screw it, I'm riding a bike. So I went and rented one and it was the best thing I've ever done! The sun had come out and the weather was absolutely perfect. We rode our bikes over fallen leaves on the ground and saw parts of the gardens you don't really go to on foot.

This picture was taken after the bike ride. Luckily for us, the friends we were supposed to meet had also rented bikes around the same time, so we didn't even make them wait!

It was euphoric. Made my birthday.