France Day 3

This is on 17th April, Day 80 of my exchange

I woke up early as usual to get dressed up first and to pack up my stuff. After saying goodbye to our hosts we (FC, YW & JH) then started out on a long drive from Rennes to Versailles. We made contact with Johnny, KH and Azri on the way through phone. After a long discussion, it was decided that KH and Azri would go tour some places on their own and meet us at the hotel later while Johnny would come along to tour Versailles with us :)

Upon reaching Versailles, we had trouble finding a parking lot. After driving through some of their narrow streets made narrower by cars parked at their sides, we managed to find one as a car left from the carpark area! After parking, we were lost as to how to pay for our parking since the ticketing stand wasn't working the way we expected it to. ither that or we couldn't figure it out :P Well, someone came along and told us that it was free parking on that day till a certain time or sth.

We then took a slow walk to the palace of Versailles. We passed by pretty flower street shops along the way and saw a bunch of Eurolines and other tour busses stopping there and bunches of foreign tourists popping out from them! lol! hmm, These tours of these tourists on busses are kinda restricted to the places and the routes that the bus takes. Whereas the 3 of us can pretty much roam around freely with little restriction :D Anyway, we met up with johnny inside the palace and got ourselves tickets to push our way in through the crowds, after the security check at the entrance.

The entire place had 2 parts to it: the palace building itself and a park-kinda place outside. We were led into the palace first. This was one of my 1st time in an european palace before and it looked great. There were paintings all over the walls, extending upto the ceilings. But after a few rooms, it pretty much starts to repeat itself. The rooms have variations of tables, chairs, sofas, mirrors, wardrobes, and fancy lights. That's about it! Oh, paintings too! The kind that look expensive! lol! and statues! and fireplaces! and staircases!

Then, we emerged into the park area. It was HUGE! There was a circular fountain abt 50 meters in diameter, followed by some grass patch areas and a long wide canal which had boats on it! We had some free and easy time to roam around and take pictures before we gathered at the other end of the park.

There were ducks at the canal area. We sat down there to have our lunch! Mine was a baguette, quarter of which went to the ducks at the canal :D After that, we needed to spend some time before the musical fountain show. So, we went around the woods nearby before going over to the front of the park to wait for the show.

Honestly, I expected something like Sentosa's musical fountain show but it was afternoon there! The show was quite disappointing since it involved the turning on of all the fountain pipes available, with no 'dancing' of water :( Oh well, it was pretty nonetheless!

After leaving Versailles, we drove to the hostel that we booked to unload our stuff there. YW and I then went on to return the car and head back to the hostel. We then took a train down to some point to walk along a river to the Lourve museum which was closed at that moment.

Nevertheless, the glass pyramids were great :D I've seen them on pictures/videos before but to be there physically felt quite surreal! FC's camera wasn't good at taking night shots and I hadn't gotten my camera's charger and battery yet :( I had to make heavy use of the tripod and have really great stability.

We then returned to our hostel for a good night's sleep. :D