Friday, October 1, 2010

Notre Dame....not the college....the Cathedral (9.12.10)

I woke up feeling worse than when I went to bed, but I sucked it up. Today we were going to mass at Notre Dame Cathedral for their Gregorian Chant. The church was really amazing!! The mass was was very nice to see, even though we didn't understand anything. The procession of mass was very similar to home. During church I just kept thinking how much my Granny would love to see Notre Dame.

After church Malia & I wanted to have authentic French cuisine, crêpes. We each had one. I had a sugar one, Malia a chocolate one. That was my first experience with crêpes, I would agree with everyone else's equation to a thin pancake, but really thin!! It didn't have a whole lot of taste to me. Definitely only a mid-afternoon snack.

After our snack, Chris, Malia, & I walked around checking out the non-tourist part of Paris. I have fallen in love with how the streets look. It reminds me so much of the movies. I love the cute, little alleys, the architecture, pretty much everything but the people and the dirt. The stereotype of rude Parisians is completely accurate, at least with my experience. People often bump into you, and hard, without a glance in your direction or even an apology. One thing I've noticed about both Berlin & Paris, when you're walking on the sidewalk people walk 3 or 4 wide and don't make any effort to make room for you to pass them (in the opposite direction). At least in the US, we fall in rank or swerve so oncoming people can pass by, but not here. It's a really small thing, but after a while it gets annoying. That's my rant for today haha. Oh, and the Parisians expect you to speak French. It seemed every restaurant we went to didn't know any English, or didn't want to. Which only is a problem when you don't know any French food words, as you will see later.

We came to a "Wanna Juice," perhaps a Jamba Juice knock off. Since Malia works at Jamba Juice, we couldn't resist the temptation to compare. It was rather hard to know what fruit you were getting, but I figured there wouldn't be bad combinations listed on the board. I have no idea what mine was, but it tasted good.

After several hours of walking around, we met everyone else at the hostel and we all, Lisa, Keith, Anna, Malia, Chris, Trevor, & I, went out for dinner. We settled on a pizza place. The food was fairly decently priced, for France anyway. It was pretty good pizza. Overall, we had a fun night out. Needless to say we were the loudest ones in the restaurant.

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