Paris!

I uploaded these pictures last night and then decided to wait and actually blog about it today.  I thought that today I'd be more rested and alert than I was last night and that I'd be able to write more intelligently.  Except, then I didn't end up blogging about it.  So.  We're essentially back where we started. 

Anyway, we arrived in Paris Tuesday night.  It was pretty exciting-- we didn't exactly know where our hotel was.  I asked the girl at the information desk for help (in French!) and she told us which train station we'd need to get off at.  Great.  And that station was the major station near our hotel, but definitely not the closest.  So.  At 10-something at night, Mitch and I hauled our little suitcases a mile or so to our hotel.  (Okay, maybe it wasn't a mile.  But we'd already been walking all day in London and it felt like a mile and that's what counts.)  Maybe it was 11-something.  I don't remember.  I think it was like 12-something when we got to the hotel.  (Basically, the point is that it was late and we were really tired.)  The next day we discovered a train station right around the corner from our hotel.  Hey.  And we would have had to transfer trains to get there, but it so would have been worth it.  Lesson learned.  For the rest of our time in Paris we used that train station exclusively. 

On our first actual day there, we walked down the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. 

That was one of my favorite things in Paris.  (I like Mitch a lot.  And I like traveling with him.  The only thing is that he never wants to shop when we travel.  Weird, I know.  I always feel like we need to check out all the new stores and Mitch always feels like we've already been walking for hours and we have twenty more historic/important things to see.  Hm.  So we keep going.  Sad.)

After that, we went to the Louvre.  A few things about the Louvre--

1.  It is absolutely as massive as people say it is.
2.  Except for the glass triangle.  I had always imagined that it would be bigger.
3.  Did you know the Louvre used to be a palace?  (I didn't.)
4.  The ceilings were incredible.
5.  And Mona Lisa was anticlimactic. 

 



This is the Mona Lisa.  I did get closer, but I actually thought the crowd was more interesting than the painting.  It's funny because people get all worked up over Mona Lisa, but really, she's just little.



(Napoleon and Josephine.  This one was one of my favorites.  And it was big.)

You could spend days in the Louvre.  Days.

After the Louvre, we went to the Eiffel Tower.  We got there just in time to see them turn the lights on.

Mitch has always promised me that he'd take me to Paris.  As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing that says "Paris" more than the Eiffel Tower! 

The next day (Thursday), we went out to Versailles.  It. is. huge.  I must not have uploaded a picture of the whole outside so I can't prove it, but you should trust me.

I also have tons of pictures of the inside, but it's like posting more pictures of a museum, so we'll skip through those.

We loved the gardens at Versailles.  Look at this--

Can you imagine having a backyard like that?

We rented bicycles and rode around the gardens and out to Marie Antoinette's farm.

It was so interesting to see all these things I'd heard about in school. 

Our last day in Paris (Friday), we went to Sacre-Coeur and Notre Dame.

The views from Sacre-Coeur were absolutely amazing.

And Notre Dame was amazing just because it was Notre Dame.

And then, after those two things, we went back to our hotel to pick up our luggage and made another trip back to the airport. 

One last thing worth noting is this drinking fountain at the airport in Paris.  I took a picture of it because it was the first drinking fountain we'd seen in a week.  Europe is very different from the United States!

Sorry it's blurry.  I took this on my phone as we were walking past it.

That's all.