Advertisement
Published: February 20th 2009
Edit Blog Post
I had a semi-cunning plan. Surprise Trace by taking her to Paris for our anniversary.
Well the surprise was a good idea in theory until I mentioned something about taking anniversary photos in Paris about a month before the weekend. At least we had a few minutes of side-aching laughter at my Homer-like ineptitude. Doh.
In the end we had a really really good weekend. After a bit of sleep in on Saturday morning we wandered off to the Louvre, which is simply massive. We struck a nice balance of seeing interesting stuff, but not over-doing it. On leaving the Louvre we emerged from the glass pyramid into swirling snowflakes. This continued for much of the day, but this was kind of cool, and the temperature was not any different to that at home.
After the kms of walking through the Louvre, we headed for an ice-cream place that my mum had recommended. "Berthillon" is apparently very famous, and always has a long line out the door. However, seeing as we were there in the depths of winter, and it was actually snowing, we got a booth inside!
Now, I have tasted a few ice-creams in
Oh yes
Note the his and her's sizes... my time, but this stuff was seriously superb. After much indecision, Trace settled on a toffee macaroon with pistachio ice-cream. After even more indecision, I settled on the most expensive thing I could find: four scoops of anything, with cream, chocolate sauce, and a crunchy caramelly biscuity thing crafted by God himself. Further delay occurred as I explored the flavour options with the waitress, but finally settled on: mandarin sorbet, pear sorbet, coffee ice-cream, and chestnut ice-cream (the winter specialty). Unless I go back to that place, I am convinced that I will never eat anything that good again.
The sugar and coffee rush spurred us on to further tourist-ing, with Notre Dame the next port of call. I like good solid Gothic cathedrals with limited gold leaf and other colourful nonsense. Notre Dame, is my kind of cathedral. Very cool.
After wandering about for a bit we found a friendly restaurant (friendly would not be the first adjective I would use to describe Parisians) and settled down for a large nosh-up, complete with wine and oysters.
On Sunday we slept in a bit again, and then headed for the inevitable visit to the Eiffel Tower. Often
I feel slightly resentful towards the sights that I feel obliged to visit. No one likes feeling like a tourist. But once there, the tower is actually a pretty cool piece of architecture. When the sun came out as we ascended the lifts, and a panoramic view of Paris was unveiled, any resentment of having to line up with hundreds of other tourists for access to the place evaporated. It’s cool, I really enjoyed it.
There was a wait for about 40 minutes to get to the first lift up to level 2, then another wait of 30 minutes to get on the lift to the 3rd (and top level), which was sweet, but we foolishly failed to consider queuing time to get back down, and as a result got close to missing our plane. Trick for beginners.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.07s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 11; qc: 25; dbt: 0.0385s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb