Day 2: Paris

I overslept. Neither my alarm clock nor my watch went off. I figured out the watch problem (the time and the alarm were on different time zones), and through later experimentation I determined that my alarm clock was running at 5/6 the normal speed because Europe uses 50Hz instead of 60Hz.

I just don't have the words to describe Paris. We started the day at Notre Dame, which is surprisingly lively for a Catholic church. Then a tiring walk from the Arc de Triomphe to place de la Concorde to the opera house to the Louvre (saw the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo) and back to place de la Concorde. We went home and got gussied up, and returned to the city for dinner, which was hilarious because everyone was drunk on wine. (This is where the first "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, oi, oi!" chant broke out.) After dinner we went to the cabaret show, which wasn't all that great, probably because the champagne ran out and our buzzes wore off. The coach took some people back to the campsite but some of us stayed in Paris to party some more. We flagged down a few taxis, and despite one driver not comprehending a word of my French (finally proving that both my chemistry major and my French minor are useless), we made it back to the Arc. The Arc is in the middle of a traffic circle so dangerous that insurance companies won't cover accidents that occur in it. So of course, since it was 12:30am and we were drunk, Jason wanted to "run the gauntlet" (run across the traffic circle repeatedly) with me, Michele and Brittany. This resulted in Jason and Brittany disappearing into thin air. Eventually they reappeared and a bunch of us went looking for a club. Our best bet seemed to be something called Queen, but then we noticed there were no other girls waiting in line, and realized why the place was called Queen. So we tried to get a cab back to the campground. A series of drivers had no idea where the campground was but eventually we found one for ~US$50. Back at the campground I had one more beer at the bar before calling it a night.