CHATEAU DE VERSAILLES
Palace of Versailles, France.
In case you don't know who this lady on the left is, her name is Kirsten Dunst :D yep, Spiderman's girlfriend -- from the old Spiderman movies. In this film she was acting as Marie Antoinette. To save your time and mine, here is the Wikipedia link of her :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette
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In brief, she was the last queen of France before the French Revolution. She was Austrian, and she was 14 when she got married to the future king, Louis XVI. She was also known as "Madam Deficit" due to her extravagant lifestyle while France was suffering an economical failure that led to starvation. She loved gambling, partying, drinking, smoking, and she loved fashion. If you have seen the movie, then you probably know what I'm talking about. So, there were a couple of conspiracy theories about her connection with the French Revolution, bla bla bla. She was seen as a traitor to the country, hated by her people, and at the end being dragged by the people of France to Paris to be imprisoned. She died with her head cut off in front of her people. Tragic. But she was no role model afterall.
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best time to go
Early in the morning! The queue is ridiculous, it took us a total of 2.5 hours to get in. You could get the ticket online, but you still need to queue for at least an hour. They had a very bad system for buying the tickets. Make sure you read upon ticketing prices, and what it includes before you come, because tourists often don't know which ticket to get and cause everyone else to wait forever (fact! we asked the guard).
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Price per ticket: 27 euros.
Includes Palace & Garden.
second thoughts
After we lined up for an hour just for the tickets, we thought that it was a mistake coming here and wasted the whole day for this palace, but we swallowed it and still lined up instead. As we approached the main gate, we actually couldn't wait and I mean seriously, it's the grandest palace there ever was in Europe. Who would wanna miss it?
We're so hyped! We finally made it in.
This is the entrance of the umm.. building that connects you to the Jardins aka Gardens. Thing is, there are many buildings that we don't know the names of. But this one, yea I remember this one from the movie scene.
The most irritating thing about this palace is its renovations and on-going constructions. It's destroying the view. But these are the gardens, they're huge and gorgeous. Every corner is filled with cool statues and pretty flowers. Kuddos to the landscape architect(s) :D
the iconic garden
now, this one is another garden, this is the view from the Hall of Mirrors.
