Advertisement
We did not get to sleep the night before until midnight or so, we walked the streets of Paris, - our Hotel is in the Latin Quarter, - and we walked up to the Seine where we took the picture of the Notre Dame by night, in the distance. It was unbelievably busy,all the little streets were lined with restaurants and cafes with waiters standing outside trying to pull people into their restaurants.
We started off the day by getting up at 6ish and taking our things to the original Hotel, where we received a free breakfast and they stored our luggage for when our room was free.
Our Paris Tour started at 9:00 am and we had to be a half hour early. We took the fast tram known as the RER and then the regular Metro tram to get there, we were early. There were so many people waiting in line all the way down the block! turns out that the computers went down the night before so everything was done by hand, we stood in line for about 45 minutes, during which time a couple tried to sneak right behind us, the young guy behind us
(Paul)tried to stop them but they didn't budge, then we turned around and joined him together with another couple, the "intruders" then tried to tell us that they were told by a staff to stand there, Reaaalllyyy! They moved, but they went a ways behind us and then proceeded to push their way in there...and this was how we officially met the young man behind us, Paul.
The tour finally got off the ground around 9:45 ish. The bus took us by all the major sights so we got an idea of the location and could figure out where else we wanted to go during our stay.
After the bus tour was done, we were dropped off along the Seine for a 1 hour river cruise. On the ship we were joined by Paul as well a young woman named Angela. Angela was originally from Memphis TN but currently lives in Boston. She told us she is spending three weeks in The Netherlands, -Nijmegen- for her work! Small world! Paul also had an interesting story, he told us he is a Buddhist splitting his time between London and Australia. After the cruise we walked over to the Eiffel
Tower and did not have to wait in line, Yay. The elevator took everyone to the second level, which was about a third of the way up and the sights were amazing. We ran into Angela there, she already had her ticket to go all the way to the top, I think Steve really wanted to go so i was happy thinking they could go up together and I could grab something to eat, but....that was not to be, Steve said he wasn't really sure at that point and wanted me to go so I figured what the heck, I am 1/3 up already, and pretty high, going higher I would still be just high, so if I was going to let fear stop me, then I should have just stayed on the ground, so I told him I was going and we got our tickets and got inline with Angela. We ascended the rest of the way to the Eiffel tower summit...lol...not even comparable to being 1/3 way up it was soooo incredible, we could see the entire City and suburbs of Paris and the surrounding country side. Seeing Paris from the ground is something, seeing it from the
sky is magnificent!
We took the elevator back to the second floor and then we took the stairs back down to the ground,. did I mention that I introduced Angela to Dutch licorice and when the Swiss people behind us noticed the roll of licorice they got very excited and that is how i ended up giving the remainder of the roll away, hahaha. Angela is going back to the Netherlands and looking for "droppies" (licorice) and pannekoeken. This talk about pannekoeken made us want to try a crepe on the street below the Eiffel Tower, tasty! We took some great photo's with the camera from the top of the Eiffel, the one on the blog came from the Iphone.
We walked home from the first to the fifth district and it took about two hours, it started raining halfway through and just before we arrived at the Hotel it poured, we saw umbrellas bend with the downpour. Once back at the Hotel a bottle of Champagne was waiting for us with a thank you note offering us free breakfast for the rest of our stay, very nice.
For dinner we went to one of the busy
restaurants *Carte Bancaire* and got a great seat right next to the piano where a young woman was playing and singing jazz, and she did it well, we did not catch her name but she had an amazing repertoire, this was a great part of our visit here. She took requests and Steve asked for *Mack The Knife*, she said she knew it but didn't bring the words tonight, so instead she played and sang a great cover of *Have You Met Ms. Jones*.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.073s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 5; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0449s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb
Derek
non-member comment
Hey, way to go Alie! You showed them not to mess with Canadians! We may be polite, but we're no push-overs. Don't confuse kindness with weakness.