Advertisement
Published: September 24th 2012
Edit Blog Post
I have a blog post that is somewhat boring for our travel days up to Paris that expose our ignorant foreigner traveling problems but it will have to wait as it is saved on my iPad which doesn't have the Internet. Wow!
Where to begin - today has been busy and very exciting. Woke up early and ready to go around 7, went down for breakfast which was a baguette, a croissant, coffee and orange juice (carb me up please). Shortly after we headed to the Paris Catacombs in the Les Halles district. There we waited in line for about an hour before we got in, so to kill some time 3 of the 5 of us ventured off to find the nearby Starbucks to feed our caffeine addiction. They do not serve Pumpkin Spice lattes here which devastated me momentarily. That aside though, the Catacombs were fascinating and I am very glad we visited there.
Basically a long story short, the catacombs were created at the end of the 18th century as an ossuary (place where you bury dead people) as Paris' largest cemetery at the time was overflowing and decaying dead people were basically creating public health
concerns by getting into the water supply (fabulous). Anyways, the catacombs hold over six MILLION bodies. It was very eerie to see the bones when we walked through. When the catacombs were created they made walls out of femur bones and skulls from the cemetery and then threw the rest of the bones behind the walls. The only bodies ever directly buried in the catacombs were those from the French Revolution in 1789 and 1792. We were over 20m underground or 130 steps. Once we came out of the Catacombs we stopped by the gift shop which was pretty distasteful in my opinion with some of the souvenirs they were selling! There was shirts and what not that said "I survived the Catacombs!" and I love the catacombs in the I love NY fashion. Guilty though, as I did buy a little pin.
After this we all headed for a bite to eat. We decided on a little Asian restaurant where I had some delicious sushi. Then Ashley and I split from the group and took the metro (by ourselves, woohoo!) to Champs d'elysee to see the Arc de triomphe as well as the famous street of shopping. The
Arc was constructed under Napoleon's orders following the Battle of Austerlitz (thank you free brochure) and was constructed between 1806 and 1836. After "quarreling" with the ticket lady (that one is for you, Nick) I was unable to convince her I was an EU student so we got stuck with paying. It was an awesome view once we got to the top and we got some great pictures of the city so it was worth the 6€.
Anyways, after the Arc we checked out the Champs d'elysee shops. We saw Cartier and a watch that costed over 40,000€, Mercedes-Benz with a car costing over 200,000€, Louis Vuitton, Swarovski (took a cool picture on the glittery stairs), plus a bunch more. The coolest part was that Lady Gaga was unveiling her new fragrance at Sephora so we managed to get a quick glimpse of her! I was more pumped to finally find jelly beans though at a candy shop as they don't appear to be that popular in Sweden. After pushing through the sweaty Gaga mob we made a quick stop at the Nike store and then walked to the Eiffel Tower, which took about a half hour. By now
the weather was great so we were enjoying the sun (about 20 degrees Celsius). We took a bunch of pictures of the Eiffel Tower, then realized how tired our feet were, so found a nice little park and laid down for a nap before meeting back up with the other ladies.
Seeing the city from the Eiffel Tower was amazing and beautiful. The waiting time in line until we actually got in the elevator was probably 2 hours. We went late enough at night that we saw them turn the lights on which was an added bonus. Following our afternoon/evening at the Eiffel Tower, we headed to the Hard Rock Cafe Paris to eat supper. By this point it was already
10pm and we were very hungry. Saw some cool memorabilia, drank some Belgium beer, ate some good food and took lots of pictures.
That's all for our first day touring Paris! Much more to come tomorrow.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.203s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 6; qc: 46; dbt: 0.1224s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Auntie Grace
non-member comment
Roxie in Paris
you look so pretty....