my last adventures

amsterdam is a very lovely city. i wish i would've had more than 24 hours there. we went to the van gogh museum wednesday morning which was pretty spiffy. then they had this "kids" exhibit downstairs about animals. they had this thing where you could draw your own virtual sea creature then send it to this virtual pool and they would eat each other and grow and have babies and die...it was pretty awesome! then we went to the anne frank house. that was interesting. there was really a lot more room in their secret hiding place than i'd always imagined. at the end of the exhibit they had this room and they presented different controversial topics then specific examples and then you could vote for whether it should be allowed or not and it showed you the % of people in the room and total % of what people thought. there was stuff like the patriot act, should irish protestants be allowed to march through catholic neighborhoods, should the japanese government be allowed to make a directory of all citizens names/age/sex/etc, all kinds of stuff. i wish we'd had more time to see more of the issues. it was really interesting and well done. they had this cartoon character at the beginning of each overall topic that was pretty funny too. unfortunately...or fortunately...not really sure, we didn't have time to check out the red light district. although we walked down this one street toward the outskirts of the city that had a couple store fronts with hookers in the windows. they were just chillin in their underwear, looking pretty bored. no, we didn't even go into a cafe. didn't have time for that either. one of them had a sign that said you had to be 18 to enter then it said "and don't fuck around" i thought that was pretty funny

ok, paris...that was amazing. thursday we spend 7 hours at the louvre. amazing. that's all i can say. friday we did the sacre coeur - beautiful cathedral, arc de triumphe...that was cool. we saw a couple other famous buildings there too - the trocodero, hotel des invalides, some other ones. then the eiffel tower. went to the top, which was pretty scary. it was cool though b/c they had the distances to major cities all over the world. then they had free ice skating on the 1st level. that was pretty awesome. i iceskated on the eiffel tower. then we went to the rodin museum. (rodin is my favorite sculptor) but it closed before we could go through the whole thing. i think that's about it for friday. saturday we went to notre dame. that was amazing. it's such a beautiful cathedral. the gargoyles are awesome. loved those. it's 422 steps to the top of the tower. we saw esmerelda's room from the hunchback of notre dame and the bell quasimodo rang. that was cool. then we spent a few hours at the centre pompidou, one of the modern art museums. they had an exhibit on dada (an art movement) which was interesting. the building itself was pretty spiffy although it's very controversial b/c of it's incredibly modern architecture in the midst of all the older buildings. then we went lingerie shopping. =P
saturday night we went out for a really nice dinner. it was kinda funny. friday i had roast duck for lunch and it was amazing. so they had some duck thing on the menu, of course it was all in french so i wasn't sure exactly what it was but i was like duck was good yesterday, i'll get it again since i never have it at home. so the waiter brings out my plate and it's 2 pink squares of meat. i was like courtney, please just tell me i'm not eating raw meat...please...and she's like no and i was like courtney, are you lying to me and she said she really didn't know. so she asked her mom when she called her parents that night and...i ate duck liver! it was gross. i foreced myself to eat part of it then i just couldn't anymore. EEWWW!!

anyways...i've done the ninja turtule art tour - leonardo, michaelangelo, raphael, and donatello, and seen probably every major artist in the world which is pretty awesome. (yeah, i'm an art museum nerd)


just in case you need a last minute christmas present idea: gift certificate to michael's so i can get scrapbooking supplies, scrapbooking supplies, money to get prints of pictures, etc.