Advertisement
Published: August 20th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Eiffel Tower
It was a gloomy day... better pictures to come! For our first full day in Paris, we woke up early to get a head start on being tourists in Paris. The weather looked dreary but that didn’t put too much of a damper on our excitement to see le Tour Eiffel. Our first continental breakfast in Paris consisted of a couple petit pain au chocolat, café and jus d’orange.
I think we scared some lady on the metro with the Eiffel Tower came into view from the train. *Squeals* We walked along the Seine to the tower and made a genius plan to come running along the Seine tomorrow. Bets on if it will actually happen?
The Eiffel Tower was amazing. HUGE. Even though it was a gloomy day, we still managed to take some great pictures. I hated the people illegally selling illegal Eiffel Tower trinkets. “Five for one euro!”…. Why do I need 5 Eiffel Towers? Anyways, the tower for the first time is a little overwhelming, but I feel like it gets better and better each time you go back. There is a huge lawn area on one side of the tower that we re-visited many times (more later).
We walked all the way
Napoleon's Tomb and the mussee militare
So pretty!! I wish it was sunny outside! down to the end at the Ecole Militaire and down the street to the Musee d’Invalides where Napoleon’s tomb stands. I didn’t really know what to expect, but as the Eglise came in to view, it was pretty stunning: a huge gold dome surrounded by a jardin. We decided that if we are going to go to one museum in Paris, we’ll do this one because history interests us more than art/paintings (you are guessing correctly, we did not go into the Louvre. Retrospectively, I wish did, especially since I found out that it is free for students, but we were saying that it’s good to leave some things so that you have a reason to come back ).
The military museum was pretty cool. Kevin and Dad would have loved it… lotssss of old weapons and visuals on individual battles, etc. I liked seeing all the different uniforms. Did you know that the musicians/drummers were actually protected by other infantry men during battle? Napoleon’s tomb was a little anticlimactic, but it was another check off my list.
For lunch, we stopped in a little sandwich shop and got paninis from some nice Italian men. These paninis were
the first of many… delicious.
Mary and I were pleased that the rest of Paris didn’t look like the quartier of our hotel. It was very much how I imagined it: old buildings with black iron terraces and red hanging flowers. I think this type of thing is one o f the more beautiful sights in Paris. Taking in the scenery, we also decided that the French dress a little weird… we saw some strange outfits on everyday people.
At the beginning of the street we saw a huge line waiting to get into some gated place. What was it? Abercombie & Fitch. Mary and I were in such disbelief that there was a line. We had to do it. 20 minutes later we walked into the store and got a free Polaroid picture with a model. Walked around the 4 floors of all the same, 96 euro t-shirts, and took off.
Saw the Arc de Triomphe. We were unaware of the underground entry to the little island that is surrounded by Paris’ most chaotic round-a-bout. We almost got ran over. And so the Arc: Check.
For dinner, we got Chinese (ah, what are we doing?).
Arc de Triomphe
in the middle of the Champs Elysee It was sub-par (shocker). This is when we first started saying “Bonjour” to little kids and then they just stare at us back. This is also when we decided that for the rest of the night, we could only speak French to each other. Woohoo!
At night, we took the metro back to the Eiffel Tower for a sunset river cruise on the Seine to see the sights of Paris by water. The man in front of us smelled so bad. BO was later termed “the musk.” This was by far the worst musk I had smelled in Paris. And even better, we were downwind of this man. With our limited vocabulary, it was quite a challenging task to converse about this situation, although we had no problem pointing out the two cute guys sitting behind and to the right of us.
We arrived back at the boat place just a sunset and again, took a bunch of pictures of the Eiffel Tower. It’s hard not to. Later we commented that it would suck living in Paris because you would just have to take a picture of the tower every time you passed it…. It’s just too incredible.
le tour eiffel
THE EIFFEL TOWER on the hour: it sparkles :) And so, we started walking back to the metro. About 2 minutes into the walk, we came to the realization that we are in Paris and we can’t just go back to the hotel. So we sat on the lawn by the tower, bought a bottle of rose from an illegal vendor (oops) and enjoyed the view. On the hour, the tower sparkles. Lo, just like every time we plug in the Christmas lights in the garage, I have the same expression every time it sparkles
And so begins an epic night. A couple of guys from Maryland came and sat with us. For some reason, we could not find a bar in Paris so we just got some more wine and played our new game, “passa boula,” means pass the bottle in Brazilian Portugeuse. After witnessing the tower sparkles for the third time, meaning it was 1am, we decided to begin the trek home. Unfortunately, we didn’t know the metro closed at 1am, so we ended up wandering around the 16th arr. For 2 hours before coming to the realization that taking a taxi would be a good idea.
When we arrived at our hotel, the
Tiago and Vinnie from Brazil
New friends and "passa boula!" front looked different because they close the big doors at night. We started knocking, and yelling. So scared that we were locked out. Then we found a doorbell and our favorite concierge, Bruce, answered. We had some drunken laughs and stumbled upstairs to bed. We both agreed we had made up for being lame the first night.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.144s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 5; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0449s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb