Georgia

So, my mom came to Paris for the first week of my stay here to “move me in” which I’m sure means that she just wanted to go to Paris for a week. We had several adventures, one of which I will recount for you, and I’m going to miss her over the next few weeks.

One day, we decided to go to Versailles, and after we got on the wrong train and just barely made it off before the doors closed we spent a lovely sixty minutes on an un-air-conditioned train with pleather seats and very loud American teenage tourists with some questionable chaperones. It was a gorgeous day, and the castle was fantastic. If you have made it your mission in life to see every Bernini in person, like myself, Versailles has tons of them, including a fantastic bust of Louis XIV. The Hall of Mirrors was also incredible, as was Marie Antoinette’s secret exit chamber where she escaped the revolutionaries. But my favorite part, by far, was the gardens. The French have a compulsive need to sculpt nature into neat little rows and squares, and consequently these gardens are unbelievable amazing. As we are tourists, my mom and I decided to rent a golf cart to drive through the gardens. The golf cart played us some very enjoyable and authentic French Baroque music (as we were told by the golf cart), and we stopped on our little tour of the gardens to buy ice cream from a very pleasant man with a little cart. I got melon ice cream and it was one of the most refreshing things I have ever consumed. My mom got pineapple and it was equally as delicious, and I encourage everyone to go find this man and buy lots of his ice cream.
As we were continuing on our tour of the gardens, we accidentally made a few wrong turns, and we ended up picking up two hitchhikers who flagged us down and asked us for a ride back to the chateau because they were tied of walking. They turned out to be the aunt and the grandmother of a girl who goes to UVa, which was very serendipitous, and really cool. When we got back to the train station, we sat on our train for a good twenty minutes in very close quarters with some Italian tourists, and then, in French, the train conductor told us that the train wouldn’t be running and that we needed to go to another train station to get back to Paris. So, we followed our fellow passengers, running through Versailles to get to the station on the other side of town. During our frantic run (seriously, just picture it), the heavens opened up and started pouring down rain on all 400 of us headed to the other station. So we arrived at the other Versailles station soaking wet and throwing ourselves onto a train that was about to leave for Paris. When we got back to Paris neither my mom nor I had thought to bring an umbrella or a rain coat, so we proceeded to walk through the rain, once again, and when we got home we were thoroughly soaked. At the beginning of the day I was wearing a cotton, light weight, light pink dress, and at the end of our Versailles trip it was red and so heavy with water as to be very unwieldy.

I can only hope that the rest of my trip will be this exciting, but not as damp.