August 14th Paris, France 9:36 I am sitting here trying to force myself to write while brett is in the shower singing "yesterday" by the beatles with a voice that sounds very girly. now he has just come out of the bathroom walking around like he's so tough complaining that his butt is wet. ok then. yesterday we saw a small part of the louvre, but it is so big that we couldn't see much, especially because it had no air conditioning and there were a hundred or so people in every beautiful room. i did see the mona lisa. it is rather small and plain and i'm not sure why it is considered the most famous painting in the world or close to it, especially because i saw more beautiful things that took more skill and more time to paint. it was amazing, some of the canvases were huge! i wished that we had more time than to just see some paintings and statues. after the louvre, we made a stop at the orsay museum, which has a huge gallery of impressionist paintings. there were many van gogh and monet paintings displayed. i saw the lily paintings that money had done, and the cathedral ones too. we caught a cab to get pictures of notre dame cathedral and when he didn't understand that we wanted to see the paris opera house (i'm sure its called by a different name in paris) we went to hard rock cafe and ate dinner. brett had stayed home because he was afraid of getting mauled by parisians after what the english man had told us. they had things signed by RHCP and Gwen Stefani, eric clapton, etc, which were all over the place, but i guess thats typical of hard rock cafe. i got these really cute shorts, mom got a t-shirt. i wanted them to get me a hoodie that looked really comfortable and cute, but with the exchange rate it turned out to be fifty dollars or so, so they got me a t-shirt instead. we got brett mcdonalds and went back to the hotel. everytime we walk somewhere, there are teenage boys that i guess are homeless or poor (although i don't know how, with the welfare programs they have in europe) that would begin to beg me for money, and i woul feel horrible, because they would have a cup and say 'bonjour madamoiselle (sp?)...' and i wouldn't be able to say i don't have amny money and i'm sorry because i don't know french, so i would have to keep walking like i didn't hear them. everywhere we go there are french people carrying these long loaves of french bread. if that was a stereotype, its true. we've gotten some that are sandwiches and they were really good. that night we went out to take pictures of the eiffel tower at night, and it was beautiful! i got a black and white photo of paris for my room and a few things for friends. we are at the palace of versailles, and it appears to no longer have grounds, only parking. it is quite ugly. more later. 17:34. It wasn't ugly a tall, inside the gates there were acres of gardens, and the palace had the most beautiful interior i have ever seen in a residential building. all of the ceilings and walls were intricately carved and painted. [it stops]