I might be stalking Julia Child.

The Louvre!
Le Cordon Bleu, I love you Julia!
Paris city mug, accounted for
"Our place" in the Latin Quarter

Notre Dame

I was in PARIS this weekend!

This was my second trip to the city of light, and it gets better every time! It was the gals and I, the same four who went to Italy and Switzerland. We left early Friday morning on a Ryan Air flight out of Marseille, and took the TGV high speed train home on Sunday night.

Sarah and I ventured out on our own for the most part, and we saw so much of the city! On Friday, after checking in a our hostel, we set out to find... Starbucks. I am not ashamed to say I was so excited to be in my favorite place once again.

The Starbucks by the Louvre is the only one I was sure of, so we headed out on the trusty metro and took a boisson (drink, in french) break so we could map out the weekend.

Sarah took out the trusty map we had attained from the hostel, and marked on it all the locations we intended to see during the weekend. Refreshed and rejuvinated, we set out to find the bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, a favorite place of both Sarah and I.

Shakespeare and Company is an English bookstore that had beds available, back in the day, for struggling American writers to stay the night in while they were finishing their books. It has a lot of character, and it right along the Seine across from Notre Dame.

The first goal on Saturday was to find Le Cordon Bleu, the famous cooking school where Julia Child went while she was living and cooking in Paris. We are both slightly obsessed with Julia (Sarah more than I, so much that we have begun to nickname her, "Julia").

It was really interesting to see the part of town where the school is, and we even went to the gift shop and collected a few souvenirs ( I get the gift shop gene from my mother ). There were also brochures available with classes at 895 euro for two days of macaroon making.... maybe in another life I will take one.

That afternoon we collected Nikki, and decided it would be a good idea to walk from Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower because it "doesn't look that far on the map..."

It began to rain and we were in real trouble.

Soaking wet and three hours later, we arrived at the famous landmark, only to snap one picture, and immediately turn around to find the nearest metro stop. It was dark, rainy and very very cold!

Dinner that night was a competely new experience. We decided to cook in the communal kitchen at the hostel.. so we picked up some veggies and pasta, and got to work.

There were about 20 other people in said kitchen, and we immediately began to make some new friends! There were kids there from Mexico, Canada, The UK, Australia and Slovakia. It was so interesting to hear what people were doing in Paris, how long they had been there, and where else they had been in the world. It was an amazing experience.

The train ride back to Aix was interesting. The TGV goes very fast, and I must admit, I got very naseaous from the movement of it! We arrived back in Aix to the pouring rain around 11 pm.