The day started off with heavy rains so I spent the morning at the hostel chatting with fellow travelers, waiting for it to die down. I met an Aussie named Haydn and a Chinese girl named Zhujun and when the skies eventually cleared, they joined Raphael and I on a day trip to Versailles. Rounding the corner from the train station and seeing the massive palace in the distance was an incredible sight. We decided on skipping the actual palace and instead spend the day in the gardens. The closer we got, the more and more impressive it became and when we circled the palace and saw the gardens and the Grand Canal stretching out for miles in the distance, it blew our minds (Zhujun then says, "Is that it?", apparently it's nothing compared to the Forbidden City!). It took 40,000 workers 50 years to construct this extravagant palace and entire forests had to be moved to make way for the extensive gardens, all during a time of widespread poverty. The gardens are so massive that they rent bikes and golf carts to traverse them with. Being the frugal travelers that we are, we opted to walk instead. There were endless gardens to see and we spent hours exploring them. In one corner, the Mirror Fountain splashed playfully in time with opera music and at the end of the Grand Canal, the Apollo Fountain depicted his chariot being pulled from the water by four horses as koi swam lazily about it. We sat by the water, watching people paddle about in little rowboats and baby swans floating along with their mothers. We visited the Grand Trianon, a pink marble palace constructed for the house staff, and the little picturesque farming village built for Marie Antoinette. We were all rather exhausted by now so we made our way back along the canal and through the gardens. Haydn and I went off to make one last stop at Neptune's Fountain and we lost the other two in the maze of hedges. After waiting on the steps of the palace for awhile, we figured they had already left so we caught the next train and made it back to the hostel in time for a homemade Korean dinner! Zhujun and Raphael were there when we returned so after dinner we all grabbed some cheap bottles of wine from the store. We ended up hanging out in the lounge along with 5 other Americans, a Canadian, a girl from Chile and a guy from Hong Kong, chatting and playing drinking games. At 1 am when they closed the lounge, we walked around the neighborhood and then sat on a street corner until early in the morning. We were all having such a great time but eventually we stumbled our way back to the hostel and called it a night!