So I had a great Christmas at home, and then came back to Paris to have a fabulous New Year's as well. My friend from San Fran, Steph, was already here ready to welcome me back and continue the vacation. Here's some stuff we did in Paris the Sunday and Monday before we headed to Switzerland.
We visited the Orangerie museum by the Tuileries Garden to see Monet's Water Lilies.
And we saw the Pantheon which used to be a church and then was repurposed to honor patriots of France.
And saw the Christmas lights and decorated windows at Galeries Lafayette and Printemps. The windows were pretty rad, all animated and decked out though not in a very Christmasy manner.
Then we went to the Jacquemart-Andre museum which is this gorgeous estate of a rich couple that loved and collected art and entrusted it all to France when they died. We had to wait like 45 minutes in line. For some strange reason, people like to come to Paris over Christmas I guess. Smarter people might check the weather first. It's been below freezing for a week now. Anyway, we decided that next time we'd get ourselves either an old person or a dog because those 2 commodities seemed to allow for cutting to the front of the line.
After dinner we grabbed some Berthillon ice cream. It's supposedly world famous. Granted it was good, but Bi-Rite creamery in San Fran beats it for taste and creaminess hands down. Steph did make friends with the woman who served us the ice cream however by fighting over Dylan from 90210. I stayed out of it because I was remembering Steve in my head, instead of Luke Perry. Steve was definitely not worth fighting over.
So Tuesday morning was a bit of a fiasco. We were running a bit late to catch our train to Geneva, then to make matters worse, the metro was delayed. We had about 10 minutes to transfer from line B to line A and board our train once arriving. Steph - bloody knee from falling down the stairs on Saturday - was practically pushing me up the stairs all winded after running through the station. I think she had a lighter pack;) Our running was in vain though. We missed the train by 5 minutes. Which means we had to buy new tickets and sit in the freezing train station on showroom ikea couches while fighting off gypsies and low flying pigeons for 2 more hours. When we finally arrived, we thought we'd accidentally headed to the North Pole (or Gremlin Santa Claus land).
We were heading to Geneva to go to this big 2 day church event for all french speaking young adults in Europe. Tuesday night we spent the majority of time playing rock band and mingling with the Brits and Americans.
Then Wednesday we got a tour of old-town Geneva by a native resident - Lucille, AKA Brigham Young. The weather was pretty miserable. It had snowed buckets the night before, and now it was all melting in the rain. Lots of puddles. Paucity of umbrellas. We were pretty miserable and all would've been just fine going back home, but Lucille trucked on.
(Taken BEFORE we were miserable.)We saw le Cathedrale St Pierre, and hiked up the tower for the view. This was the group of Brits and Americans we hung out with all day.
Notice my boots? Then we headed over to see the geyser. Let's play a game. See if you can even find it in the picture. (More proof of our nice weather.)
Now for the AFTER picture.
That night there was a "ball" where everyone had to dress in white. After dinner, the music started off with a mashup of Come Come Ye Saints which was pretty rad :-) New Year's came and everyone counted down in french. We were with the Americans who didn't speak French and it took them from 15 to 7 before they knew what was even going on. Hehe.
(I was wearing white boots and white nailpolish, FYI)So come 2:00am, Steph and I were sort of wondering when this thing was going to end. Evidently it was scheduled to last until 6am. Ha! Europe is great. We however had to be on a train to Lausanne that morning so we went home at around 3 to get some sleep.
Lausanne is probably pretty cool, if you are smart enough not to book your time there on New Year's Day when everything is closed down - or on January 2nd which unbeknownst to us is ALSO an "everything is still shut down" holiday in Switzerland. But we got some good views of the Notre Dame cathedral there.
And had some 4-cheese fondue.
Then headed back to France, though not directly to Paris - see next post.
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