have a handkerchief and noDoz® at the ready

no, no, no, our last day in paris! we fell in love with this city and were sad to leave. saying goodbye properly of course began with pain au chocolat!!!!! eaten in square de cluny. (sidenote: after 3 days of repeat business, jenn still froze and stumbled through the pronunciation when she went to order. ah...c'est la vie!)

2nd stop, the pompidou. but not before an eventful metro ride. i don't think we mentioned earlier, but the parisian metro smells kinda bad. like b.o. and who knows what else. not important, really...except to set the scene. we were riding on a crowded, smelly train with our backpacks, since we'd already checked out of the hostel. (we must note, however, that our backpacks were quite small. look closely; you can see them in a few posts.) we had made our way to the train door, getting ready to exit at the next stop. a slight, gray-haired lady approaches the door as well, and says to brandon, "pardón, pardón" but he doesn't hear her. instead of waiting to see if we'd get off when the train stopped, she clearly just assumed we were stupid americans (the validity of which is not important). so she pushed brandon's backpack not once, not twice, but three times and yelled french at him all the way off the platform. hilarious and sad. she was a hard pusher too.

the pompidou was interesting + fun, although pretty messy inside considering the concept of an inside-out building. but there were nice spaces and views of the city; the art was cool and the café was good for wifi and sketching and more people watching.

3rd stop was the arc de triomphe, but again, not without an exciting metro event. we walked round and round this one metro stop that had crazy winding tunnels to find our connection. after exhaustion and frustration set in, brandon's backpack got smashed in the sliding doors of a turnstyle. he was struggling like a turtle with his shell caught and at this point it didn't seem funny. he was really stuck! he powered his way out, with no help from jenn (again, she froze). prinzings, 0. parisian metro, 2.

the arc de triomphe was cool to see, massive in scale, but not a highlight of paris. (although our triumphant-posed photo might have been.) then we meandered our way through side streets, eating more bread and cheese. ohhhhh, then it was time to go. we couldn't be sad for long, though. 2 cities down, 5 to go and still a ton to be excited for.

last stop in paris was gare du norde to catch our first ever overnight train to berlin. and if you think you're exhausted from reading this, imagine how exhausted we were doing it.