Bonjour!

Sleepy in Paris as I write from the metro after a long day with my special guest:

Sara!!! My baby sister is studying abroad for the month of August, living and learning in Paris! This has been a dream of mine for her for a long time. Bahahahah. Silly, I know, but she has been positively enthralled with France and the French language since she started taking French classes in high school. When I studied abroad, I discovered how amazing it feels to connect and interact with people in their own language, and I knew she would get a kick out of getting to do that every single day. So now, three years later, here she is!

And here I am! Couldn’t pass up such a good excuse to head to Europe again. I’m here for the week, and another special guest joins us tomorrow! Stay tuned.

We had a slow start to the day because I was passed the heck out. I told Sara to wake me whenever, but it hurt my face to move when she attempted to rouse me at eleven. I finally managed to open my eyes all the way around 11:30, but Sara was cranky because she’d been waiting around since half past eight. We finally made it down our six flights of stairs a bit later.

No elevator makes for a long walk and a nice view.

We got trapped at the bottom for a while because the exit door wouldn’t open. Thankfully, some guys came in and showed us that our problem was we weren’t pushing hard enough! Whoops. We also discovered that we were accidentally wearing the same outfit.

Next was some confusion at the train station, but a bunch of nice people helped us to finally find the correct train tickets. Pain au chocolat in hand, we boarded the train just before 2pm and were in the little town of Provins by 3:30. A late start, maybe, but our day was still full and eventful!

We chose to visit this little town because of its medieval castles and architecture, and Sara wanted to get out of Paris for a day. We began our day with a pleasant little walk from the train station to the medieval city, and Sara could not handle how pretty everything was.

It was a long walk up a long hill, but we finally made or to Cesar’s Tower!

And you know how I feel about towers, so that was our first activity!

I swear Sara liked it even more than I did. “I can’t handle this. Shut up. This is so cool! This is beautiful! Wow. I cannot handle this.” And so on and so forth.

To give her credit, the climb and the views were quite amazing.

Next, we mosied across to the cathedral, where we peaked in on Sunday evening mass. It always floors me that people go to church in beautiful places like this because I am used to the minimalist style of small Christian churches back home. The small congregation of about 15 people were singing and the sound echoed around the wide room, ringing beautifully.

We wandered after this in search of some food and came across a little rose-inspired boutique. There is a famous rose garden in Provins, so all the gift shops were filled with rose-scented things and floral tea sets. We grabbed a bottle of this Rose Limonada, which I thought was lemonade. Imagine my surprise when I shook it up a little bit, popped the top off, and instantly had my hand and forearm covered with fizzing pink soda.

Ha! More like Sprite than lemonade. It sure did hit the spot, though, under that hot French sun.

We wandered a bit more and shared a salad that I was too excited about to take pictures of, and Sara regaled me yet again with her French skills. She’s amazing! And she’ll never even know I said that because she never reads these blogs. Hahahahaha. She was impressed when I asked for the check in French, though. Go me!

We spent our remaining hours in Provins wandering and admiring the sights.

Lots of things were closed by this point, including a bunch of adorable doors!

Tehehehe. A kindly older man asked if we were lost at one point, and Sara had the cutest conversation with him. First he tried to offer us a ride to the train station, then he told us we needed to come back next weekend for a party that was happening (he showed us a flier for some sort of Renaissance-themed festival), and then he talked a bit about our trip. All in French! So impressive that Sara was chatting away like that!

There were more wanderings, more slow-moving creeks, more pictures…

And then I slept the whole ride back on the train. I also took a little nap in the middle of the street at one point, but I’ll save those pictures for another time. Haha.

I’m on my own tomorrow, but we’ll meet back up in the evening to pick up Mama from the train station! Woohoo!

Time for sleep. Bonne nuit!
-Lizzy-wa