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Published: August 11th 2014
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Just a few of the padlocks on one of the bridges Bon Jour!
Day 1: We have a lovely apartment at the Citadines in a very lovely central spot across from the river Seine. What an amazing place the Seine is with it's restaurants, pop up shops on the pavements, kids areas with games painted on the grounds, e.g. hopscotch and many other games I've never seen before but look intriguing. There are some buskers, and oh, the padlocks locked onto the bridges - this is where lovers buy the padlocks with their names engraved and lock them onto the bridge fencing and throw the key into the river. This seals their love for one another.
The boats on the river are varied with a lot of houseboats, tourists boats, commercial ones and people being ferried here and there - it never stops and is great to watch. Some tourist boats do a dinner and show at night - might do that one night perhaps.
In the morning we decided to go for a walk and walked for miles and miles and miles, we had 'Skip the Queue' tickets for the Eiffel Tower and made our way to it but had a few stops along the way.
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Tee Pees being set up on the left bank We dropped in at a cafe on the river for coffee - the coffee was E5.00 each!!! The coffee was lukewarm and not even nice but we drank it and then moved on and had some lunch about an hour or so later and then to the Eiffel Tower. If you haven't seen it, it is very imposing and much bigger than I thought it would be. Not far from there was where we were to meet our tour guide and group we were going with. Our Tour Guide - Justin was very helpful and good TG. We are so glad we pre bought our tickets (from the French Connection travel service - Sydney or via PHT) as we didn't have to wait in the huge long queues to get a ticket or to get in to the Eiffel Tower.
We went on the first lift which took us on a 60 degree angle and then straight up to level one where we changed lifts and the second one went straight up - right on up there. The views were incredible on the way up and even more so when we got to the top. It should be on
everyone's bucket list - totally amazing. There is a restaurant on level one - Jules Verne restaurant - apparently very popular and not overly expensive, although it pays to book.
We had a great time there and met some of the other people from all over the world. Glad that the Parisians speak English quite well as I was a bit worried about relying on my school French - although it has come in a bit handy at times.
After leaving the Eiffel Tower we noticed a huge police presence - actually the riot or swat squad as they were all very heavily armed, not far from the ET. There was a Israel Gaza protest rally on. The police or gendarmes had surrounded the area and blocked off roads and entrances for miles around here the rally was held. We assume it was a peaceful rally as we haven't heard anything further.
We walked all the way back and realised that we had walked for about 5 - 6 hours or so, and were quite exhausted. We hit the sack when we got home and woke up at about 4am!!!!!
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