Paris Day Two- Jeff Slawson

Day two of Paris began with an early morning wake up, and a short metro trip to The University of Paris. The University of Paris is the third oldest university in the world behind Oxford and Bologna, making it full of history. The University brings relevance to us and our trip because it is home to the first International Olympic Committee meeting in 1894. Essentially, this place was the reason for our whole trip. 

Pierre de Coubertin decided back in 1894 that he desired to bring the Olympics to a world wide scale, and to make them more professional. He brought together multiple sports officials from different countries in order to set up universal rules on each sport. His hidden agenda, however, was to discuss the possibility of making the Olympic Games an annual event. Coubertin would eventually succeed, and in 1896 the world saw the first modern Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. 

In our tour, we were given the opportunity to see the exact meeting room that these talks took place, and the auditorium in which guest speakers would talk to all of the members of the conference. While our tour guide only spoke French with some broken English mixed in, our personal translator formally known as Professor Ryan, or P-Ry for short, got us through the tour, and allowed us to understand the relevance of the campus. 

After our campus tour had finished, we walked for what to me seemed like the equivalent of a fortnight. The walk took us from the campus, all the way to the Louvre. On the way to the Louvre, we stopped at the Chapel at Notre Dame, an incredible building to look at, and even more so on the inside. Walking around the Notre Dame I truly began to wonder how they were capable of building that huge chapel with no modern tools or scaffolding. I mean I can barely change a lightbulb in 2015, and in 1163 they were building a 226 foot tall chapel. 

Once we left Notre Dame, we headed towards the Louvre to study some of their Greek exhibit, and also to see their main attraction the Mona Lisa. The Greek exhibit provided us a very unique look at some of the parts of Greece that are relevant to our trip, and the Olympics.

The biggest disappointed to me was actually the world famous Mona Lisa. While the painting was phenomenal, I believe the other art within the Louvre is just as impressive. Simply turning around would provide you with a painting just as great.