what on earth was louis xiv thinking?

ever since taking "enriched european history"

during my sophomore year in high school

i've wanted to go to the palace of versailles

so david and i sacrificed one of our days in paris

and took the RER train to versailles for the day

(rick steves told us it could be "an afternoon trip"

and he was terribly, terribly wrong)

the palace was pretty big, but the gardens were just absolutely enormous

and i don't know how louis xiv managed to get around

although.. he probably had a carriage to pull him around or something

thumb war on the metro

ps- we took the metro the roundabout way

and it took 1.5 hours to get there instead of 20 minutes = fail

first look at the massive gardens

along with 34,675 other tourists

latone's fountain and parterre

flora fountain

petit venise? and a swan

with the treesssss

david on the left, and little me on the right

a field of sheep, nbd

inside marie antoinette's apartments

(i don't understand why her house was so far away from the palace)

but it was pretty fancy

i loved that each of the rooms was color-coordinated

stopping for a photo in marie antoinette's gardens

though at this point our feet were dying

everything gigantic = feet really, really sore

(and at this point we were still more than 1.5 kms from the palace)

photos by david

the petit trianon

with the dragon fountain

the pyramid fountain

we saved the palace for last

the hall of mirrors!!!

this is was the main reason that i wanted to go to versailles

it was a little hectic because of the mass amounts of tourists

but the mirrors and windows and chandeliers were still gorgeous

then we went to get a little lunch

and took the metro back

(when it only took 20 minutes we realized we went the long way that morning)

and when we got off we found this: