Bonne Anée!

That means Happy New Year, for you English-speakers!
Another year has come and gone. An entire decade has come in gone. It's already 2010! The year that I will graduate high school and begin college is here already. Time flies, doesn't it?
I hope everyone had a good New Year's Eve!
So for New Year's Eve, I went to Paris with my host family. First we drove around Chinatown Paris looking for a place to park. I have never in my life seen more Chinese food restaurants. Ever.
We found a place to park and then went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. I had sautéed noodles with shrimp and coffee-flavored ice cream for dessert. It was all good. It was nice to eat Chinese food again.
After dinner we took the subway to the Eiffel Tower. Actually, we didn't get off at the Eiffel Tower stop, we waited one stop, since we weren't going in the Eiffel Tower, just standing in front of it. The tourists who were on the same train as us didn't know to do this and got off at the Eiffel Tower.
We walked out of the subway station and there it was, le Tour Eiffel! It was soooo pretty on New Year's Eve, all lit up blue. We found a good place to stand, well it was good for me anyway. There wasn't really any good place for the Ferrands since they aren't tall... but I could see the whole Eiffel tower minus the very bottom. It's situations like these where I'm quite glad that I'm tall. The Eiffel Tower looked sooo big from where we were standing. The light show started at 11. The tower was lit up in every different color imaginable, and the lights moved and stuff, and it was such an amazing sight. There were like thousands and thousands of people there. The people behind me were British... maybe from England, I couldn't tell from their accents. About 10 minutes until midnight, the Eiffel Tower was lit up in sparkling white lights, and as it got closer and closer to midnight they flashed faster and faster. When it was finally midnight everyone cheered and some people in the crowd set off fireworks. Which is kind of dangerous, but whatever. Then after a few minutes people started to head towards the subway stations. The subway was free from New Year's Eve at noon to New Year's Day at noon in Paris. It was like mass chaos trying to get to the subway station. There were just so many people, and a good amount of them were drunk. There were tons of French policemen everywhere, looking quite intimidating with their multiple guns, sticks used to beat people, bullet proof pads on their shoulders and chests, and helmets. Finally we got to the subway station, where a bunch of people played subway sardines. There was hardly enough room on the subway for my lungs to move to breath, and I'm not exaggerating at all. And at each stop more people kept squeezing into the train; no one could move so much as an centimeter.
Finally we got back to Chinatown, and drove back to Vernon. Of course traffic leaving Paris was pretty bad. By the time we got home it was almost 4 a.m. But it was really amazing to be in Paris in front of the Eiffel Tower to ring in the new Year!
I hope everyone in the States and various other parts of the world had fun on New Year's Eve!!!
Bonne 2010!