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Published: January 3rd 2009
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We landed in Paris early on Monday to find its hard to get French ground crews to work in the morning, I don’t blame them as I looked out the window to see the ground sheeted in a layer of frost. Soon 30 minutes had passed after we had been waiting at the terminal gate before we started to disembark. With this being my first European trip I was unsure what to expect. We funneled through the terminal and headed to customs. Angela went first and I followed, trying to be polite and using some basic French. We headed to the baggage collection point only to find our after more waiting that or bags had not come through. Great, it’s minus 2 outside and we had limited cloths on us and no bags, this was not the start we need to this vacation. We found the baggage information counter and soon found out that our bags had been lost at some point and ended up in Singapore, they had picked up on this and our bags were being rush transferred to Paris and would arrive about an one hour after us. However transfers between terminals is slow at best and we
could expect to have our bags by tomorrow, to make matters worse we had organized a driver to pick us up from the airport and chauffeur us to our hotel and we were worried that they were still waiting for us to come through to the arrival lounge. We need to make a decision about our bags and opted to go collect them our selves hereby insuring we would not be without cloths. This meant transferring from T2 to T1 and some how convincing airport security to let us come back in to T1 arrivals and pick our bags up off a baggage belt from the plane from Singapore.,
So we enter the Arrivals Lounge, No chauffeur, no time to wait or worry, We grab a cab, Not going to happen as the cabby said to take the inter-terminal transfer train, this was ok in theory but it was a long walk to it and our hand luggage did not help and in scheme of things we were not really in the mood.
The long and short of it was a few hours passed and we soon had our bags again and took a taxi from T1 to
Iced up
Water feature at the Louvre our Hotel (Approx 30min ride and cost 40 Euro)
Finally Paris, I was looking forward to the next couple of days and was keen to start exploring the city, As it was early we dropped our bags at the hotel and headed out, our first task was to pick up our Paris Passes, I had looked them up on line and ordered at the last minute and this meant that we had to pick them up from the Hard Rock Café , We decided to walk to fill some time until they opened.
(What is a Paris Pass. It a kit that has a Museum Pass, Metro Pass and other features as well, it enables the user to unlimited metro travel and access to over 55 museums and attractions in Paris)
Pass in hand we headed for the Louvre as it would be closed on Tuesdays, Angela having already visited on her last European trip had seen some of the museum before and I had a few things that I wanted to see but we did not want to get tied up there all day so we made a route that encumbered what we wanted to see
with the “The Victory” being on the top of my list. However my true passion lies in Architecture and a lot of my interest was focused on the building it self more so rather than the artefact's within it. The Louvre was packed with tourist and was hard to navigate at time because of this, the cue for ticket was ridiculous and the pass had already started to pay off as we are not required to cue and also get a secondary entry point to speed up the process.
Afterwards a bite to eat at La Benjamin Cafe on Rue de Rivoli not far from the Chatelet Metro station, With our drinks alone costing 15 euro i leaned that a large Beer is close to 1L not quiet what i thought i ordered but enjoyable.
Refueled and ready to face the cold we then headed for the Notre Dame Cathedral, it was noticeable on approach as the towers stand above the surrounding roof lines, absolute stunning, you could spend hours looking over the details, its hard to imagine a construction project of this scale in 1200's. However we were unable to enter the towers due to ice issues.
So we spent some time inside.
From there we spent some time wandering the are and looking at local shops.
I recommend anyone take the time if in the area to stroll down to Rue Saint Louis en I'lle just over from the cathedral as it is filled with an array of shops and stores well worth a look.
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