Ben Murrell

I got up at 9:00, packed up (had to check out and back into a new room) then left for Versailles. Had a baguette on the way, and the train ride ended up taking an hour and a half. Worth it? Definitely.

I spent about 1.5 hours wandering the palace with an audio guide then another 1.5 hours in the garden (unfortunately, they don’t run the fountains every day, and this wasn’t one of those days), then another 1.5 hours on a guided tour of the King’s private apartments and the chapel. On the tour, we went to the room where King Louis XVI received Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and agreed to fund the American Revolution! Awesome.

I got home at about 6:40pm and had the hostel dinner at 7. Met a Scottish girl (Mel) and ran into James again. James was going to the Eiffel tower again, but I decided I’d go on the pub crawl. [[I'm pretty sure this was my first...]] The pub crawl ended up being really fun! There were about 50 people total and probably 40 of them were from Michigan State University studying abroad – they were crazy. We went to four bars, then ended up in a club. Danced with a lot of hot girls, then I left with Tina and her friend… then on the way home, Tina started puking in the cab (wtf?) so I was like “Oh, my hostel is real close, here’s 3 euros see you later!” and got out in the middle of Paris. I started walking back to the hostel. I saw the cheap rental bikes, so I tried to get one but my credit card wouldn’t work (Europe has chip cards, and I think I needed one of those). I kept walking for about an hour and made it through one of three districts I needed to walk through to get to my hostel. At this point, I decided it would be worth dealing with Parisian cab drivers and caught a cab at 4:00am. It ended up costing less than 10 euros… which was better than I expected. In hindsight, I should have stayed at the club and met more people, but oh well.

It was a good last night in Paris