What a wonderful weekend!

This weekend has been lovely.. nice weather combined with friends visiting from studying abroad in London!  Friday we all went out in a big group to a few different places and had a blast.  Yesterday, a friend's host family was gone for the day so two of us went over for lunch.  She lives near the Arc de Triomphe in a massive, beautiful apartment with fantastic old-style molding and ceilings.  I love to see where people live so this was really fun for me.

Then we enjoyed the lovely day and went for a walk down the Champs-Elysees towards the Louvre.  Even though it was a really long walk, it felt great to be outside.  We stopped at the Petit Palais on the way.

 Mostly, the structure of the building impressed me much more than the art on display because the floors were very intricately mosaic-ed and the cielings had incredible moldings and paintings.  They did have this Monet painting though which I loved, it is not as dark in person:  

Then we met up with the Londoners for hot chocolate at the Louvre and got out student Louvre cards which get us in for free there and at the Delacroix museum which I am very excited to see!  

Our program basically gave us fake student ID cards that say we are studying Art History which gets us into lots of museums for free.  At this point the Londoners wanted to go down and picnic by the Eiffel Tower but some of us split off because a) it was very cold and b) until then I had successfully forgotten it was Valentines Day in the "most romantic city in the world" and I didn't need to see fifteen proposals to remind me!

Instead we went to some strange Greek restaurant that had a boar's head mounted on the wall because it had a 10 euro menu and they hustled us in by offering free sangria.  Afterwards we ended up going out with some French guys that one of the girls in my program knew.  That was fun even though they spoke only French (very rapidly!) to us, so it was a major effort for me to follow the conversation.

Have I mentioned that out of the fifteen people in my program, three of us are named Lauren?  We are all friends too, so when introducing ourselves to the French guys last night, 3 out of the 5 of us were Laurens.  I don't even know what kind of impression that makes.  

Phew! Thank gosh for Sundays because after typing all of this out, I'm tired just thinking about it!  Today I think I'll mostly do homework, and go to another girl's apartment for dinner.  Also, I am booking my flight to Prague today!  I found a great 2-for-1 flight deal online, so me and a friend are going the weekend of March 13-15.