Trip to Paris

I am doing a really bad job of writing in this. Since the last post, a lot has happened. We finished our intensive German course, which I passed with the equivalent of a B, but thanks to only the credit transferring, it doesn't really matter. Real classes started then, which I will describe in my next post. This time I want to talk about our trip to Paris.
The night before we left, Shaun asked me if I wanted to go to Paris for the weekend. I said sure, but we really never decided anything. The next morning at breakfast we actually started to talk about actually going. We decided to and then went to our class. The professor never showed up, and we left the class early. We tried to catch the next train to Paris, but it was leaving half an hour after we left the class, and we didn't have anything packed. The next train left a few hours later. We took that one. I describe this because I think it shows how spontaneous this trip was.
We got to Paris after a 4ish hour ride. We found a hostel and then went out for dinner. We found a pizzeria that was still open, so we went in. I should say now that I speak almost no French, so a French menu didn't mean anything to me. I ordered a pizza that seemed good. That was a bad choice. The pizza I ordered had tuna and corn. I don't like tuna, and corn does not belong on a pizza. The pizza also had an egg cooked on it, which wasn't too bad. Suffice it to say, dinner was interesting.
The next morning we went to the Louvre. It is a pretty cool museum, and the building is even better. The building was huge. There were so many rooms that we definitely didn't see all of it in 4-5 hours there. It would have been better if we had gotten one of those translator things that have head phones, but that takes a really long time, and we didn't think about it. All of the placards were written in French. Also, a lot of the museum is art and sculptures, and while it impressive and I know I could never do the same things, it doesn't mean much to me and I can only look at art for so long. After the Louvre, we went to the Arc de Triumph. It was pretty cool, and the view from there was spectacular. After that we walked around the main part of the city and then went to dinner.
The next day we took a river boat tour. It was pretty cool, seeing most of the major points of interest in just an hour. We also went to an aquarium. It was rather disappointing, and it was more expensive than the Louvre. We weren't there for very long. On Saturday we also walked around again. We saw a few embassies and then decided we would look for US embassy. We wandered around for several hours, but didn't find it. For dinner we had mussels, which didn't seem that appetizing, but weren't actually that bad. It was another unique dining experience. After dinner we went to see Iron Man 2. Apparently it came out in France before the in the US. Who knew?
The next day we went to see Notre Dame. It is a very impressive church. However, I think there were a lot of people who were there to see the building, not the church. It kinda made me sad, and a little angry. It didn't feel quite like a church because of all of the tourists. We also went to mass there. It was in French, so I didn't understand anything, but it was kinda cool.
On Monday we went to the top of the Eiffel Tower. The weather wasn't the nicest, but it was our last day so we had to go.
Overall, Paris is a nice city to visit. However, it is fairly dirty. There were a lot of places that smelled like urine and many of the public trash cans were over flowing. I could wander around the city for days looking at the cool buildings and visiting places that aren't as famous, but our days were full as it was. Also, it is expensive, like everything else in Europe.