Florida State University Athletics
Day Three: The Seminoles Meet ‘The Mona’
8/13/2000 12:00:00 PM | Women's Basketball
Aug. 13, 2000
By junior Lakesha Springle
Today started with an early wake up call. It took me forever to pull
myself from the warmth of my bed. We had breakfast and got set to leave at
10:30 a.m. When we (the team) got on the bus, excitement filled my body
because today was the day we were going to see the Mona Lisa (or “The Mona”
as April would call it). The first stop though was to Rodin’s “The
Thinker.” We posed for a picture and all looked as if we were “thinking”
ourselves.
We didn’t stay there long, because we were all anxious to see
“The Mona.” As our bus pulled up to the Louvre, we saw that the people
waiting in the lines were never ending. After waiting for awhile to get in,
we had two hours to see it all. Running around like chickens with our heads
cut off looking for “The Mona,” was very eventful. When we finally found it
we could not get within 10 feet of it, because of the people that surrounded
it. I was a little upset at first, but then I thought “well at least
I got
to see it from 30 feet.” A lot of people have never even gotten that close.
After we left the biggest art museum in the world, we stopped for lunch at
a local caf? and then headed to Sacre Coeur. The Sacre Coeur is a beautiful
church with one of the best views of Paris that I have seen. We once again
posed for pictures. It was a long way up to the church, but we made it.
Outside the back of the church were several little shops with anything and
everything you could imagine in them. It went from postcards to paintings
by Van Gogh. It was almost like a fair.
We spent most of our time shopping.
Sitting down at a caf? on the street, my trusty former teammate Latavia
Coleman spotted me from across the way. As she looked both ways before
crossing (the driving here is crazy), she was laughing and trying to talk at
the same time. Of course I didn’t understand her.
Finally I understood the
words that were coming out of her mouth. She told me that there was a guy
on the sidewalk with three pucks and one of the pucks had a white dot on it.
The guy would scramble the pucks around and the people would have to pick
out the one with the white dot. Then she told me that there were two other
guys working with him and they were hustling people.
Of course, being the
curious American girl that I am, I had to go see what the deal was. We
walked up and there were about 30 people standing around this little
cardboard box with three pucks on them. We watched as these guys hustled
all these people out of hundreds of dollars (franks).
It was pretty funny
to see.
We met again as a group at 7 p.m., and boarded the bus for the hotel. We
were on our own for dinner. Me and some of my teammates had a delicious
Italian meal. Curfew was 11 p.m., which was no problem, because we were all
tired from a full day of sight-seeing on our last day in Paris. Tomorrow,
we hit the road for Lyon, where we’ll play our first game.