Monday, September 21, 2009
So, after a nice long train ride – on a really broken down train – we arrived in Paris. We were once again really unprepared…we ended up changing our hotel while in Barcelona, but didn’t write down any information about the hotel. We also didn’t look it up again while in Madrid…so upon arrival in Paris, we spent about an hour trying to find internet to look up where our hotel was. This was quite the feat. We were so retarded and frustrated with ourselves, but thankfully we found a little hotel café that had internet and found out where we were supposed to go.
We arrived at our hotel earlier than check-in was, but we hoped that we would be able to get into our room early. Thanfully they just finished cleaning a room with a double bed. It was a nice room and nice hotel in a central location. We showered and then headed out into the city. There was a little café down the street from our hotel where Sam got a Croque Monsieur – basically a grilled cheese sandwich, but it had a ton of cheese. I got a salad with steak – actually was like a hamburger patty on top – and a fried egg on top of that. Very interesting, but we both enjoyed it.
We then headed to the Louvre. We were already amazed by it, and we hadn’t even stepped inside. The architecture outside of the Louvre is amazing and the view is really spectacular. We headed down an escalator to the first floor of the Louvre and bought our tickets. We didn’t buy an audioguide this time, but realized we definitely should have once we were inside. Unfortunately, every single piece of art had an information card next to it, but it was only in French. Every other museum we’ve been to they have the information about the piece in English as well as their own language. So that was a little bothersome.
But it was really amazing. We were definitely too “museum’d out” but it was something we had to do, so we did it, but probably would have enjoyed it much better if we’d done it the first day. I mainly wanted to see the Mona Lisa so we just made our way in that direction stopping to see the pieces that caught our eye. The Mona Lisa was actually quite small but there was a huge crowd and you couldn’t get within 10 feet of it. But we were able to take pictures, so that was pretty cool.
After the Louvre we walked to the Arc de Triomphe. It didn’t look or seem that far, but it was a much longer walk than I expected, but we found a creperie on the way along with 2 new shirts for Sam. It was fun being on the streets with all the people too. We did the touristy thing and walked only halfway across the cross walk so that we could get a picture of Sam in the middle of the road with the Arc de Triomphe behind him. Pretty fun and every tourist was doing it.
Afterwards we walked to the Eiffel Tower. I was so excited! We could see the tip of the Eiffel Tower almost the whole walk there which was a lot of fun. We took a break across the street from the Eiffel Tower and sat at this little park area with really cool fountains. We were able to take some really cool pictures from here too. We then walked over and were able to take in the full scale of the amazing architecture. We took way too many pictures, but had a lot of fun. We walked over to the line to take the elevator to the top, but it was really, really long and we were getting hungry, so we decided we could pass this up. We’d already gone to the top of the Notre Dame and didn’t think we’d see much difference, but I’m sure it would have been beautiful.
We then took the metro to St. Michel for dinner. We were told by the woman at the front desk of our hotel that the restaurants along the Eiffel Tower were way over-priced for the quality of food, and not worth it. So we took her advice, and are so glad that we did. We found this amazing restaurant. I think I chose it because it was red inside and pretty full of people. We sat upstairs along with a few other couples. Sam ordered pork tenderloin with caramelized apples and roasted potatoes. I ordered 5 cheese ravioli in a chive cream sauce. Oh were we in heaven! I think Sam finally understood what a really good meal was. He could not stop talking about how good every component of the meal was. We then switched plates and were both still very happy. We got a chocolate mousse for dessert and I really wanted to then get one of everything else on the dessert menu, but we decided not to let me gain 15 pounds in one meal. Hehehe.
We then tried to find our way back to the hotel and thankfully we did. It was a beautiful night and we could see the Eiffel Tower all lit up from our hotel. It was a perfect ending to a great trip.
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