Paris, la plage, et beaucoup des photos!!

Ok, I am finally sitting down to write this very overdue post. I have been crazy busy the entire vacances! I have so much to write about, and have taken tons of photos. I almost feel like I should break it up into two posts, but I'm about to go back to school so I don't know when the next time I'll be able to write is. I'll try my best to fit it all in!

I guess I'll start with the very first day of les vacances. We got up early and drove out to the sea with our neighbors (my host family is very close with them and we are always doing stuff together on weekends), where we went to a place with a big sign that said "Fruits de la Mer", where they were catching and selling fresh crabs, lobsters, oysters, sea snails and other various sea creatures. We picked out some crabs (araignées de la mer = spiders of the sea), oysters, and lobsters, then went to our neighbor's house to prepare it all. For dinner that night we had a huge feast and afterwards, played music and hung out until a little after midnight. 

   

On Monday, I got on the train to Paris, where I spent the week! The first few days I was with a friend of my host mom, then the rest of the time I was with another AFS exchange student who is living with her host family in a neighborhood just outside of Paris. My first night there, we drove around and saw "Paris by night". Later on, my friends and I walked the Champs Elysées by night as well, which was amazing. 

I got to do lots of sightseeing, and went to the Louvre, which was mind-blowingly huge. People tell you, oh yeah it's the biggest museum in the world, whatever, but you really can't even comprehend it's size once you're actually there, with the masses of other people. Oddly enough, my favorite piece of art was the building itself, I couldn't stop looking at the intricately designed ceilings and murals. I also really loved the Egypt exhibit. 

Le musée du Louvre was incredible, although I have to say that one of my favorite things about Paris was definitely the street art, which was colorful and modern- often including pop culture icons, I noticed- amongst  all the ancient buildings and historical monuments. It made for really interesting contrast and somehow worked together- long story short, Paris is beautiful.

And of course I can't forget about another type of street art- living! Lots of street performance artists were working in and around le plateau Beaubourg, near le Musée national d'art moderne, which has one of the coolest architectural designs I've ever seen! 

The Sacré Coeur and Notre Dame were other tourist-y things I visited, and they were gorgeous. The view of the city from the Sacré Coeur was insane, and the photos I took don't really do it justice. 

The last thing I've gotta mention about my Paris trip is definitely the shopping. Of course there was the Galeries Lafayette and all that, (Chanel and Kenzo galore... I die) but my favorite thing was something I'd never heard of before- Kilo Shops. They're basically high-end thrift stores where everything is labelled by color and each color has a price per kilo. So you end up paying by the weight of your clothes. It's really cool, and fun to hunt around and see what fancy vintage stuff you can find! 

All in all, it was an amazing week and I learned soo much. Coming back from the fast-paced city was actually really nice, too, and I'm happy to be back with my family. My friend Lucy from Rennes came to stay with us for a few days and we went to a few different beaches. Bretagne has incredible beaches, even though it's not warm enough to swim or anything. It got pretty hot during the day, (hot for Bretagne at least... Certainly nothing like ATL.) we splashed around the the water a bit and went pretty far out onto the rocks, exploring all the cool wildlife that make their homes in the shallow pools left by the tide. 

This is in Perros Guirec, about a 45 minute drive from my house:

And this is Ploumanac'h, also in Perros Guirec:

And lastly, my favorite, Plage Bonaparte, which is only about a 30 minute drive:

And here's me and my beautiful host sister, who, as I mentioned in my previous post, is coming back to Atlanta with me in July!  

I hope that wasn' too long and rambly, I wanted to share what I've been up to before I get neck-deep in schoolwork again. (Speaking of that, yikes, I have homework I need to finish.) I finish school on June 20th, which is way later than I'm used to but I'm taking it as a positive because even though it'll be hard, I now have the opportunity to work as hard as I can on my French. And to establish some sort of work out routine... All this bread and cheese, man.. Anyways, thanks for reading this, if you made it to the end! I'll be back with an update when I can! :)