first thursday

The next day, we met up with our group in montmarte for a walking tour. I had just been there with my mom the year before but this time we walked around the whole place, and got to see some cool things I would have never known about. The first thing we saw was the wall of love, I think that’s what it’s called. This artist asked people from all cultures how to say “I love you” in their language/dialect then he created this tile mural featuring 200 different ways of saying it.

We saw the outside of  this apartment building where van gough once lived. Our tour guide told us that they have just recently found out that van gough didn’t cut off his own ear. They say that he was fencing with some other artist friend of his (Gaugin) and the friend cut off a piece of his ear on accident. Van gough, being the caring person he is, decided to lie and say he cut his own ear off so that they wouldn’t send his friend to jail. I knew I always loved him for some reason.

Another interesting thing that we saw during our tour was this tiny little vineyard which was probably the size of my house. Our tour guide told us that they have a festival every year where they harvest the grapes grown there and turn it into a wine. The catch is that the small vineyard only produces 500 liters a year so they auction off the bottles each year to raise money for montmarte. Apparently the reason people like buying this expensive wine even though it doesn’t taste great is because it is only wine that is made from grapes actually grown in paris (vin du paris.)

Finally we ended at the sacre coeur, the famous montmarte monument.

I bought a really cute dog keychain made out of pipecleaners from this French guy near the monument. I requested that it look like the french flag. Coolest part was that me and my friend katie made our request in french. She did most of the talking but I understood some of it. Best part was when she was explaining how she wanted it to look and the guy kinda laughed as us and told us he knew what the french flag looked like.

At night we attempted to meet up with some of our new friends at montparnesse station for some drinks. Since me and dorene are still phoneless, we suck we know, we made plans before we left about meeting them at the metro stop. Who knew the metro stop had 5 different exit options! After 3 water filled blisters and an hour of looking around desperately we gave up and decided to come back home.  By the time we switched our first metro line I was officially about to give up. My feet were about to cry from the stupid heels I decided to wear and I truly thought I could not walk any farther.

As we were waiting for the next metro we heard an announcement over the intercom (its not usual for there to be announcements in the metro stations) and saw a few people leave. We continued to sit there until we heard another announcement and saw everybody around us starting to leave. By then we realized that maybe we should listen to the announcement and attempt to figure out what it was saying. Turns out there was a “grave accident” (dorene thought that meant someone died, my elementary three french knowledge knew that grave just meant serious), and that the metro line we needed to take home was closed for the rest of the night.

To be very honest I have NO idea how my feet made it home that night or how I asked the guy working in the metro station how to get home. We ended up having to backtrack to another line, go up and down more stairs than the number of times I complained that night and getting a 6 euro taxi ride back home. I like to think of it as the best “going out but not really going out” night so far.