Thursday November 24 – Flight to Paris/ Thanksgiving

                To go to Paris our API group left from Granada’s airport and it is not that bad of an airport, it is small but not that bad. For about two hours Scott, Matt, and me played Monopoly on my iPod Touch, Matt won. When we got to the airport at Paris I did something that I regret a lot, I was so hungry and we had another hour ride into Paris and then we were going to have to wait longer for food because we had to check in at the hotel so I broke down and bought a one Euro McDonald’s cheeseburger, it was the worst thing that I have done in Spain, but I was sustained for a while.

                The reason that it took an hour to get to our hotel was because the traffic was so bad that we were basically at a stop for a long time. We had Thanksgiving dinner at L’Amazonial, there was a squash soup, bread, corn, carrots, mashed potatoes, turkey with cranberries on top, an individual pecan pie, and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. There was no gravy, but the food was good, but I did not get full like I do normally on Thanksgiving. The bill for all of us was over 1,000 Euros.

                After dinner we all went our separate ways to explore the city. My left ankle had been popping almost nonstop for about the past two or three days and was in an intense amount of pain. My group walked around and came upon Notre Dame; they then wanted to get something to drink so they asked a French guy and he was pretty funny and told us where to go. Unfortunately when we got there the prices were outrageous, it was our first taste of how expensive Paris is. We went into a bar and Trevor got a glass of wine, it was one of the smallest glasses of wine that I have ever seen and one of the worst tasting, it cost six Euros and a half pint of beer cost nine Euros. No one besides Trevor got a drink because of the price.

                At that point we were all a little tired from traveling and thought it would be a good idea to get some rest for tomorrow so we took the metro back to our hotel. Paris’ metro is very smelly, I know most metros do not have the best odor but this one was especially smelly. When we made it back to the hotel I Skyped my family at their Thanksgiving dinner, although a lot of them had left already, and it was good to see the ones that I did. I cannot wait to see them all for Christmas.