Paris Bus Tour

---

Out the door around 9am and looking to buy something for breakfast. Clearly everyone else in Paris is still in bed, because absolutely nothing - not even sandwich shops - are open. In the end we give up and make do with a banana each.

Our plan is the 2-day hop-on hop-off open-top bus tour. The weather is spectacular - if not slightly too hot - and it's not long before we're off on the 1st circuit of 4 included in the ticket price. This is the main leg - Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, The Louvre, Arc de Triomphe for starters. One word - WOW! Did I mention that there was too much to photograph in London? Hah! Paris is London multipled by 100!

The architecture here is stunning. Not just the beauty of it, not just the scale of it, but the sheer volume of it. Every single building in every single street is pretty much unchanged from hundreds of years ago. Wide, broad avenues with monolithic structures that meet in huge round-a-bouts criss-crossed with narrow, cobble-stoned streets lined with classic Parisian apartments. Then throw in the odd statue, pillar or arch. They weren't big on parks though.

We managed to complete 3 of the 4 circuits today, taking in the Bastille amongst others. This gave us a pretty good idea what we wanted to look at in more detail. The location of our apartment is perfect - a short walk from the starting point for 3 of the circuits. We actually came back to the apartment twice during the day for toilet breaks!

After the 3rd circuit we'd had enough of buses and decided to revisit a few of the more famous locations on foot to take some proper photos. We started from Notre Dame, walking along the Seine past The Louvre (on the opposite side of the Seine) up to Place de la Concorde, then straight up Avenue des Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe - just under 3 hrs walking. We had planned on walking back via The Louvre, but time was getting on so we hopped back on the tour bus which crawled back to Notre Dame.

We bought a couple of couple of souvenirs each and went in search of a supermarket to buy some cereal for breakfast. Supermarkets are scarce (and hidden) around here. Wanting dinner we then sought out the cheap takeaway pizza place we saw last night. The number of people on the streets was unbelievable, especially in the narrow back-streets surrounding the cheap eateries. In one place we literally couldn't get past, and opted to detour around the block! Saturday night in Paris! We found it! The pizza is actually made like a "pizza pocket" - doubled over and filled with your selected topping, and the smeared in tomato paste on the top. We took it back to our apartment (it was very nice), washed it down with some coke, and promptly fell asleep around 11pm.

We'd heard about the queues at The Eiffel Tower, but weren't prepared for what we saw from the bus as we passed. There must have been a few thousand people at the very least waiting to get up the tower. We resolved to get up early tomorrow and beat the rush, so we set the alarm for 6:15am.

---