Paris avec les Bloque-mates!

Leaving the Levesques last Saturday was very sad, but on the bright side, it meant that I was on my way to Paris for 2 days to see...my blockmates!!! A rendez-vous in Paris, how fitting. The Paris party included Petah, Tori (plus 2 friends), Johnny, Hannah, Rachel, Cote, Pauline for the first day, and me. We stayed in an apartment in the 17th arrondissement that Tori's family friend let us stay in for free. Pretty amazing of him. And he left us a bottle of wine to boot.

So as I am just about a week behind in posting, and I want to catch up asap, the next couple posts will be ones of few(er) words and many pictures. To begin: Petah met us on Saturday morning at the train station and took us back to his host family's apartment to use the salle de bain, have a glass of juice, and meet his host family's cat, who I befriended immediately:

That's a French-ass cat! Next up, we made our way to Tori's apartment, and Tori met us at the Metro stop and WE WERE REUNITED YAAAAY! Because two Victorias are better than one. We put our bags in the apartment and promptly started on a magical tour of Paris led by none other than Petah (for anyone who doesn't know, his actual name is Peter, but I always say his name in a British accent because...he's Canadian. Yes.) First up on our Parisian tour: lunch. Because we were really hungry. But we made it cultural by eating on the Seine.

Afterward, our tour included the Louvre, the Tuilleries, Notre Dame, Paris Plages, Musee d'Orsay, l'Ile de la Cite, the Champs Elysses, the Arc de Triomphe, Pont Neuf, Pont des Arts, and many other things along the way. When I say these things were on our tour, I mean that we walked by them and took pictures of them. However, we did do some actual shopping on the Champs Elysses and we stopped for group pictures at the Arc de Triomphe.

B-e-a-utiful! After Petah's tour, we were le tired, so we grabbed some crepes and made our way back to the Seine to eat. I oderered an ouef-fromage, and the crepe man piled it high with delicious French cheese. I was really happy about this until I started eating it and it erupted in a lava flow of grease that landed on my French-ass purse which was but a day old. Sad. Hannah saved the day by lending me her Tide to go pen, and that plus a little dishwasher detergent on the spot later did the trick. Yet another crisis averted on this trip with the help of mes amis.

We went back to the apartment, rested up, got changed, and decided to break out the champagne (pronounced sham-PAH-nya). We figured we'd have one bottle, but one bottle turned into three, and three bottles turned into nine silly bloque-mates and friends. Here's PAC(K) being really serious about our champagne:

And here's everybody being themselves on the couch. Petah was a beast, and Johnny was taking a picture of me because he thought my way of drinking (see cider picture from my last post) was laughable. Rude.

And finally, the crowning (literally!) moment of the night--when I gave Tori her birthday present, a princess tiara from the Tower of London. You can tell by the look on her face that this is undoubtedly THE greatest gift she has EVER received in her life EVER and she absolutely could not be ANY happier about it.

So many moments. To end the night we headed to the Eiffel Tower to see it lit up, and it was beautiful. You should look up the Eiffel Tower at night if you've never seen it before. We missed Devan a LOT so we called her from under the Eiffel Tower to say hi and that we missed her a LOT. Unfortunately it was a short conversation because international calling is foolishness, but it was nice to have her there in voice and spirit. A magical end to a magical Parisian tour.

On Sunday we got up, went to Sacre-Coeur, then Rachel, Cote and I went back to the apartment to grab our bags while the others went to the Champs Elysses to get a good spot to watch the Tour de France come in. Making our way back to the apartment by ourselves was easy with the help of my teeny tiny Metro map:

We grabbed lunch, got our bags, and made our way to where everyone was standing, leaving us 20 minutes to see the bikes come in before we had to turn back around and head through the solid mass of people on the street to be on time for our 5:30 train back to London. Apparently whoever won the Tour de France (I still don't know the winner) was not on the same schedule as us, because he and the other cyclists arrived 45 minutes later, just as we were going down the stairs to the Metro. Oh well, at least we can say we were kind of there.

And then, a few hours later, we were back in London once again. France--and especially Paris--went by so quickly! It was a bummer to leave so soon, but I liked seeing this sign as we made our way back to the mew: