France

There's this church in Paris called Saint-Chapelle. It's a lot smaller than like the cathedrals there but you walk in and the walls are just stained glass and so on a really sunny day you go in there and it just there's so much light like just rainbow colors of light. It's really beautiful to experience so I definitely recommend Saint-Chapelle. Also, I don't know, I know the Notre Dame caught on fire and I don't know how soon people will be able to visit it again but I definitely recommend doing that. I was able to climb the tower to the top of the Notre Dame and you get to see the bell tower and gargoyles. Also, right outside Notre Dame along the street there's a row of like artists booths and so that's a fun place to look at artwork and it's right by the river so it's a fun area to walk around.

A really cool place to visit when you're in France is Amfleur. Amfleur is a tiny little port village. It's in between Le Havre and Caen, and so it's kind of in between there, but it's just the cutest, most quaint little village, and it's colorful, it's beautiful, and I would recommend going to Amfleur.

You have to go to the Gardens of Versailles. Honestly, you could skip the palace if there's like a three-hour line to go to the palace. Just skip that, go straight to the gardens because there's so much to see there and they're so beautiful. Especially, there's a hamlet, this little village that Marie Antoinette made that just it looks like this tiny little village and you walk around and it's really pretty and really different from the rest of the French gardens that are there. So, I definitely would recommend doing that. If you want to see Monet's water lilies, go to L'Orangerie. It's this whole room that is a circle and it just has the water lilies going all around you and it's beautiful and you'll want to experience that. It's right by the Louvre so you can hit that on your way to the Louvre Museum as well.

During the Renaissance, they built a lot of castles in France and they're really really cool. In other regions in France, castles have all been destroyed because of war, but they're mostly preserved in Pays de la Loire, Angers, Nantes, Cholet. If you're around there, then you have a good chance that there's a bunch of castles near you that you could visit, and I would for sure recommend it because they're all pretty cool.

If you're ever in a city called Melouse in France, there's a museum there called Cité de l'Auto and it's really cool because it's like the biggest car museum in the world and it has this ginormous collection of old and new Bugattis which is really cool.

You have to take advantage of all the cathedrals and all the different things to see in Lyon.

So one of the favorite pieces of advice I got when I went to Paris was to visit Sacre-Coeur, and I don't even know if I'm saying it right, but it's a super cool place. You kind of get up into the city first, and there's graffiti everywhere, and it doesn't look super nice, but you have to find the staircase, and there's like a ton of flights of stairs, but it leads up to this beautiful cathedral and this view of Paris, and you can see the Eiffel Tower and all of Paris. There's street vendors, there's street artists, like I got a gigantic crepe, and I had someone paint like my portrait, and it was just beautiful, my favorite part of being in Paris.

There's always awesome cathedrals to go see, and one of my favorite places, it's called the Dune d'Arcachon, and it's in the Bordeaux area. It's about an hour train ride out there, but it's super cool. It's the biggest sand dune in Europe.

My favorite place to visit in France is a place called Carcassonne. It's a little city just south of France or in the south of France and there's actually a board game named after it and it's just really awesome because it's really old and there are a bunch of really cool walls and it was just an awesome place to visit so I recommend going there.

You are in one of the cultural hubs of the world. You can just walk outside and find buildings that have been around for longer than the country of America has. There's just a lot of really cool cultural things to do. I loved it, just kind of all the history that was behind it. There's so many museums, not just in Paris. No matter where you are, you can find a museum. There's giant cathedrals in just about every city you can imagine, and those are always really cool to visit. So I'd always say visit the cathedrals, visit whatever museums are around. Just go to your Centreville and kind of explore. There's lots of pretty places in France. If you don't like that cultural side, I think there's a lot of like... They do have a lot of cool like basketball and soccer places to play just publicly. So I think there's a lot of really nice parks that you can visit out there and just kind of like have fun, get some good exercise. Maybe even meet some French young people that are playing as well.

My all-time favorite thing was go to the Mont Saint-Michel, which you should google. It is the castle that Harry Potter is based off of. It's surrounded by water, so it's like a castle in the middle of the ocean, and it's amazing. You can drive up to it when it's low tide. It's really beautiful. There's like a whole city on this little island around the castle.

The Louvre, the museum, it was so big. I never got to see the whole thing the day I went there, but I got to see the Mona Lisa. It's a lot smaller than I thought it would be. I never saw it up close, but I just saw it from far away because it had a very long line and I didn't want to stand in line for hours just to see it up close. There was a lot of other great things to see there at the Louvre. So I had an opportunity to go to Egypt, but I never took it. However, I did get to go to an Egyptian themed restaurant in Paris, France. It was really cool. The restaurant guy was really nice and kind to me.

Some of my favorite things that we did was walking around the ville and looking at the different buildings or we loved finding little restaurants and going and trying them, finding any pretty lookout points, any easy hikes if there were some near, have fun and explore France because you're not going to be there forever and you won't regret seeing a new street or eating at a new restaurant.

Definitely go and look around places in France. I've been to Paris, I've been to some other places outside of Paris as well, and there's just so much to see and explore. You don't always have to go to the tourist hotspots, you know, like I mean in Paris you definitely gotta go to the Eiffel Tower, but there are lots of other things you can do. One of my favorite activities was actually just strolling along La Seine, the river in the center of Paris that runs through, you know, Paris, and it was such a good experience. I mean like, you know, there wasn't like a lot of people because it's not like a Eiffel Tower where everybody's in line waiting for something, buying a ticket or so. I was just, you know, strolling through like the across the river, you know, like along the river La Seine, and it's so beautiful. It was winter, you know, like you can see the Notre Dame, you can see so many things over there. It was really peaceful and gave me time to kind of reflect and, you know, meditate as well.

We went up to a little town called Chamonix and there we got to take a gondola up the Swiss Alps to the highest mountain in Europe. It's where France and Switzerland meet or I think Italy as well. It was the most beautiful just scenery. You got to see the Matterhorn from the top, all the Alps. It was just so incredible and breathtaking.

Something that I would recommend visiting when you're in France is the Tapestry of Bayeux. It's in Normandy. It basically is the super super long tapestry that tells the story of William the Conqueror and the wars and the battles and you get to listen in on the like the story and it tells one by one one piece after another piece and the women who created it were there stitching every stitch retelling the story of William the Conqueror and Queen Mathilde and it was really awesome and really cool. I really liked it.

My very favorite art museum in Paris is Musée d'Orsay. It's across the river from Lingerie and the Louvre. It is beautiful and it's in this old train station, so really cool feeling there. It has a lot of Impressionist art, which is my favorite to look at, so I like to spend all my time there. Also, if you go up to Sacré-Cœur, it's this church that's up on the hill, so you get a really pretty view of Eiffel Tower and Paris. Also right by it, it's this neighborhood called Montmartre. There's a lot of artists there. It's a great place for, like, if you want to buy art, there's a lot of places to buy it there, and there's a lot of artists painting people there, so you can get your portrait painted. They have a little macaroon shop, and it's just really fun to walk up this hill into this little neighborhood of artists.

Go visit the Pont du Gard. It's an ancient Roman aqueduct and it's giant and it's well-maintained and it's beautiful. You can get some great pictures out there. Go do that. If you're in other Roman cities like Nîmes, Arles, Avignon, Orange, go to one of the Colosseums and experience it. Take a tour. It's worth it.