Au Revoir, Paris

Goodbye, Paris

The following post dates for Sunday, June 24th.

Last day in Paris.

So no weird stuff really happened last night. Well while I was showering, Michael who was sleeping, for some reason got up and turned off the bathroom light. I was showering in the dark. I got out real quick to see what was going on and I see Michael climbing back into bed. Again, no recollection of this in the morning.

All we had planned for today was Notre Dame since we didn’t get to it yesterday. We woke up around 9:30 and checked out of the hotel. We left our stuff in the storage room before taking the metro over to Notre Dame. I think I’ve been here before as well but my memory is a little hazy. We took pics outside before going inside.

Now before I proceed, there’s something that I like to talk about called the Vatican factor. It’s very similar to the ‘wow factor’. So far out of all the cathedral, churches, chapels, and basilicas I’ve seen, nothing has been able to compare to the combination of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. So the Vatican Factor for the Vatican was obviously very high. In a way, from all the traveling we’ve done and things we’ve seen in the brief stay abroad, we’ve become somewhat desensitized to amazing works of architecture, history, and art. And this applies to more that just cathedrals, but everything else. Well, at least it has for me, I don’t know about anyone else. Don’t get me wrong, in no way at all am I belittling anything that I’ve seen.

So back to Notre Dame. Standing inside, I felt like I was not as impressed with it as I was with other cathedrals. So I forced myself to take a couple steps back, figuratively speaking, in order to appreciate where I was. Inside was gorgeous. I felt bad because there was a service being held, given that it was Sunday, and all the tourist were walking around snapping photos and being noisy. I was one, but at least I had the courtesy of turning off my flash. There were gorgeous stained windows and side chapels all throughout the cathedral.

Eventually it was time to leave so we headed back to the hotel to pick up our luggage and walked to the train station. Everything went relatively smoothly: we got there in time, got through customs fine, boarded the train, sat together, no annoying Germans or little children. Nice.

Sadly however, we had no time for food. So I went to the café on the train and had two bags of Lays potato chips. Hunger quelled, but in no way satisfied. Everyone slept pretty much the whole way back.

Incident: So we put our stuff (luggage and souvenirs) up top on the luggage racks. But the train can turn quite a bit going back so our stuff kept falling on these people behind us. Oops. Oh, and it stank. These other people behind us had terrible body odor.

So we got back to Waterloo at around 4-ish and had some sandwiches. I had two more bags of chips. Still hungry, miss home cooking. We then made our way to Liverpool street, where we caught our train back to Cambridge. Took around an hour and 15 minutes.

The bike ride home was pleasant. Felt good not walking.

I made it back to the homestay just in time for dinner. This time, Karen was the cook. She made a traditional English roast lamb dinner. It was so good, I nearly cried. It’s been too long since my last home cooked meal where I actually had enough food. It was roasted lamb with garlic and herbs, fried and steam potatoes, steamed vegetables, and Yorkshire pudding. There were three types of sauce. A white sauce for the vegetables, gravy for the potatoes and meat, and mint sauce for the meat as well. All I can say is, Lauren and Harry are two lucky kids to have two chefs in the house.

After dinner, I went over to Clair and Rebecca’s place to catch up on what I had missed out on and study for our exam tomorrow. I am somewhat stressed about it, hopefully all goes well. Probably bed late tonight.

Dreaming of heat transfer,
James