Day 11, May 22, Sunday, Paris
Today another person joins our trip. Her name is Lifang, she's from NUS, she's from Ji Lin in China, and she's cute and funny. Jesse thought she was cute, too, haha. So it was good. We went to the Notre Dame again, but it was open when we went there, so we went in and the interior of Notre Dame was just as amazing as its outside. The grand, majestic Gothic ceiling with its flower-lie arcs was astonishing on the first look. There were also numerous chapels, sculptures and paintings all around the cathedral. I wanted to take a photo of the gorgeous altar during the breaks of service, but I got caught red-handed haha.
We spent about two hours inside, then we went to eat. I had chocolate crepes it was good but too little. If you want to have a filling meal of crepes in Paris, you're gonna spend about 20 bucks. Then we headed down to the Pantheon, it was too expensive to get in. Why would we pay 6 bucks to see dead people, even if they're Victor Hugo? I wanted to head down to Louvre but lifang reminded me that we probably only got 3 hours left for Louvre. So we changed to Centre Pompidou. These guys sat down with some Pakistan portrait painters and had them draw a caricature for them. So I waited for them and got dragged by another Pakistan 'artist', he told me he was gonna draw for himself, I knew it wasn't true but sat down anyway. So he drew an ugly caricature for me, his standard is only like slightly higher than me. Haha. So he offered to sell me the thing at the end, and I turned him down. My sympathy almost overwelmed my sense when he told me he got no job and no house. Then we saw our biggest discovery of the day(well kinda sad that it was the biggest), it was three Mongolian musicians performing Mongolian music. The lead singer looked exactly like Wang Huajia, it was fucking hilarious. But I was amazed by their music, the raw and simple chords together with the coarse, almost unbelievable voice had a very fresh power. I wanted to see Pompidou but it happened that the Picasso section, obviously the most attractive part, was under renovation. But the center itself was a pretty amazing piece of artwork with its red tube and almost totally transparent exterior.
At night we watched Shao Lin Shi, haha. It was so good. But the DVD had some quality problem and we couldn't finish it. Damn!
So that was about my first eurotrip, well not that juicy or exciting but I loved it.
That night I reached the hotel I paid for at like 1130, the silly Chinese boy at the counter didn't let me in, well he was stupid but my lousy French was probably a problem too. Luckily Karina appeared and it was soon settled. The next morning I went down to the flea market, the jeans there were so freaking expensive I hated it. And my excellent bargain skill din't work. I spoiled a con artist's dirty trick, he hated me, I couldn't figure out how he did the trick though. Oh well.

leaving skool guoyandao at 5:05 PM [comment]

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