Taking Europe Part 1: Paris, France
I've spent the last five days in this beautiful city of love eating croissants, drinking coffee in the sunshine, and wandering the Louvre. This is my first adventure of studying abroad for the semester of Spring 17 and I'm already loving it! I've always wanted to visit Paris after watching the Disney movie Ratatouille. I love the movie, yes, but more so I've always been such a romantic in tales of those who create themselves out of nothing. I begin school in Athens, Greece in a few days and decided to stop here on the way. 
First I'll say, I've never experienced jet lag before and I was actually quite unsympathetic to those who complained about it until my first night here when I was asleep by 5pm and wide awake by 3am. Inconvenient, but resulted in me getting my first view of the Eiffel Tower with the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen. For anyone planning to study abroad, I totally recommend getting to your destination a few days before class start to let the jet lag settle because it is MISERABLE.
Secondly, I will never understand how the french eat so much bread. Perhaps it is that I've been sucked into the idea that the only ideal French food is chocolate au pain and ham and cheese on a baguette however my intake of bread back home is maybe a slice of toast once a week or a sandwich when I go out for lunch. Here, the french serve bread with every single meal. Warm, savory, fresh baked delicious bread. Wagner dining hall, love ya and your sandwich paris but this is PARIS. We went to two museums here, the Louvre (of course) and Museé D'Orsay. A person could spend weeks in the Louvre, I was overwhelmed by the size of the MET in NYC when I first visited for a class trip with my LC Freshman year, but the Louvre is impossible to get through in one day and gets a bit draining after a few hours. The Mona Lisa was neat but underwhelming due to the flock of tourists shoving each other to get it on their snapstories. I honestly enjoyed watching them more than seeing the piece.
Chateaû de Versailles was easily my favorite part of the trip. The palace is about 8x the size I expected, and I felt like I was thrown into an episode of Downton Abbey. They have an audio tour available right when you walk in which I 100% endorse. I was telling my grandma a story how in second grade we had to do a project on a famous person and most kids did athletes and singers and I did the beheading of Marie Antoinette so we walked 35 minutes into the depths of the gardens that stretch for miles just to see her apartments. Looking back at the pictures I am still in awe of the grandeur of it all.