Paris Day 2

Today we all woke up early and had a great itinerary set up including getting to the Eiffel Tower really early, being the first group up there, having breakfast on the tower, and the going to the Louvre. A really, really rainy day in Paris cut those plans short as soon as we saw the tower was closed because of lightning.

Matt, Paul and I quickly rebounded and headed to the St. Lazare train station to get all of our Eurail train reservations. Because of our passes, we got steeply discounted prices for all of our tickets but we still had to make our reservations and managed to book some of the last seats on our Paris - Barcelona train. They were out of 2nd class student seats so we had to get 1st class seats on long ride (but had to pay more for them). Still, we took any ticket we could get and got the rest of our tickets sorted out for really, really cheap.
Afterwards, we found out that the Argentina-Germany game was at 4pm (10th grade French skills are coming back!) so we opted to go tour the Musee D'Orsay instead of the Louvre which we thought would take a lot longer.

Because Paul and I were "students in Europe", we were able to get free admission to the museum. (Yay Regent's College ID!!) This privilege is reserved for only European Students so poor Matt had to pay the student admission price.

By four, we were back at our hostel and watched Germany surprising dismantle Argentina. I must admit that I fell asleep after the outcome was assured and woke up to Germany's 4th goal (and was asking Matt and Paul when they'd scored their third). Then, we went to the grocery store to get dinner supplies. I had a classic Parisian-style TV dinner (rice and pork) and also whipped up a mean Tomato-Mozarella salad. It was really, really good and I was excited to validate my cooking ability in a foreign country. Now I'm getting ready to root on Espana (since we want them to be in the semis and hopefully finals next week!)

Check back soon!

-Simon