Bastille Day

Louis Vuitton exhibit

This weekend was one for the books! On Friday, Joanna and I went to the Louvre L'arts Decoratives part museum. It is the fashion/textile etc. museum of the Louvre. We were happy about getting in free for being students in Paris, and not having to wait in the mile long line for the real Louvre. They were having a Marc Jacobs/Louis Vuitton exhibit, which was really cool. We ate at really cool organic restaurant by the Louvre.

Salad at French Organic Restaurant

Just shopping with Kelly..

After, Joanna and I decided to walk down Rue d'Honore, a long street that has about every high end store on it, along with Zara, etc. I remember going into that Zara with our family! After walking around for about three hours, we really wanted to find this store Collette that Leigh had recommended to us. We asked about 10 people for an hour because we knew it was on the street. Finally, we found it. It reminded us of a upscale Urban Outfitters, and it had a cafe on the bottom with coke bottles designed by Karl Langerfeld, the designer of Chanel. We were about to leave, when I spotted Kelly Ripa with her husband, Mark Consuelos. My heart was racing because she cracks me up and I have always loved her. I grabbed Joanna and told her I was going to go say hi, and Joanna was too afraid to go. Un-characteristically of me, I went up to her and said "Hi Kelly! I am a big fan would you mind getting a picture with me?" Joanna walked over towards us and said hi and we all started having a conversation. She told us she was here for 48 hours for the Madonna concert, and that it was nice to have a vacation without her 3 kids. We told her we were studying in Paris and she thought that was really cool, asking how our french was going. Also, she asked us where we were from! The whole time I was shaking. I don't think I've ever met a famous person like that. And it didn't help that I have always been obsessed with her and watch Regis and Kelly as much as I can because of her wit. Anyways, Joanna and I were on cloud nine for a few hours after. It was a great day. It was very relaxing spending the day just the two of us, because we have been in a large group for a lot of the trip. When we got home, we did laundry at our laundry mat downstairs. Surprisingly, we figured on how to work it in French, and it felt so good to have clean sheets. I felt like I was living in the 60s thought.

Baby Bottles..

That night, some friends of ours invited us a nice restaurant for dinner. They had made reservations, and we haven't been to a nice-ish meal since we got to Paris. Still, Joanna and did not want to spend the  26 euros on the set dinner + drinks, so we picked up sandwiches before so we could get a small appetizer at dinner and ate them in the laundry mat. The dinner was really nice and the restaurant was really swanky. After, we went to a bar where they serve drinks in baby bottles, and every drink is named after a Disney character. They gave us dry erase boards and said if we can draw our character the drink was named after that we wanted, they would give us 4 euros off the drink. They also had a variety of games to play at the table, and we played a fun game of UNO. Not the typical bar experience, so it was very amusing. For Bastille day, almost every arrondissement has something called the "Fireman's Ball," which is basically a big party put on at the fire stations to raise money. We followed the loud music we heard, and found one. I was surprised that they allowed this to go on, because it was outside and I am sure very disturbing to the neighbors. It was really fun and different because it would be shut down by the police in a second if it was in America...

Now for Bastille Day! We slept in on Saturday, which was nice. We met a big group of CEA people and ate lunch by the Eiffel Tower. I've found that I really don't like to be in big groups of people, especially at meals.. But anyways, we got to the Eiffel Tower lawn at about 6 or 7 pm, and found a really good spot right dab in the middle. The weather was SO nice, which was a great surprise because the weather had said it was a 90% chance of rain all night. We had not seen sunny skies in what seemed like forever. We sat on the lawn until 11 when the fireworks started. I think they had an 80's theme, because the tower had a huge disco ball hanging from it, there were disco balls set up around the lawn, and all they played was 80's music during the show. We all thought it was funny that it was almost all American 80's music. The fireworks show was amazing, lasting 30 minutes. It was so pretty and I kept thinking how lucky I was to be standing there watching fireworks behind the Eiffel Tower. I will never forget it! The only downside was that it was freezing the whole time we were sitting there, but we were glad it wasn't raining. After, we were all really tired and did not feel up to enduring the Fireman's Ball round 2. We took the jam packed metro home, and enjoyed a great nights sleep and sleeping in.

Happy Bastille Day!