France
Where to begin? Maybe the beginning, but that might make for a long post if I try and put all the events of the last 13 days or so into one. My trip got off too a late start with a canceled flight out of D.C. But, when United gives you lemons, make lemonade, right? So I spent a day in D.C. and got to visit Stephen (who's parents graciously let me stay the night) and Emily, who's birthday it was, as I discovered after the fact. So, a day late to Paris, but I also was switched to a direct flight from D.C. which was nice.

I arrived in CDG a little bit early (well, early for the new, day late flight anyway), found my bag with no trouble (even though it had been been bumping around in the system since I left Roanoke the day before and had a flight change) and then found Carl who was nice enough to take an early train to meet me so I didn't get lost in the middle of France.

Amiens is a nice city, it has a population of around 160,000, so maybe about 3 times larger than Blacksburg or Amherst. Rather than go one by one through every little event I will just summarize: we ate lots of bread and cheese, went to Paris for the weekend where we visited the Eiffel Tower, some famous street and a famous arch thing which were nice, as far as streets and arches go, and the Louver. That place is huge and would probably take a couple days alone to just see everything they have there. We saw the important things, like some greek pots and famous statues, and of course, the Mona Lisa. Apparently, everyone who sees it says that it is smaller than they expected, and in this case, I will agree with everyone. Personally, I think it is overhyped, I mean, it's just a painting of some woman smiling. Don't get me wrong, it's nice and all, and I think Leonardo Dica--- I mean DiVinci, did a fine job, but when all is said and done, it's still just a painting of some woman smiling. Apparently not everyone is as cynical as me though because there was a constant crowd around the painting, everyone taking flash photography even though there were many signs posted (not to mention it is just common since, but unfortunately people are selfish little creatures and think only of their own selfs) prohibiting flash photography. I did take a photo too (without the flash, naturally), just to show that I was there.

So that was Paris, after a couple days of recoup in Amiens we went off to Lille, where it rained when we were outside and cleared up when we were inside. We just walked around and came across a rather nice cafe were I got a salad and a crêpe and our server called me a fat cow, which sounds much nicer when said in French.

That is it for France, off to Belgium, which I think deserves a separate post, just for organizational sake.