Paris Sights
Justin and I had 7 days in Paris (he flew in Sunday at 13h10 and we left the next sunday at 12h10) so we had a lot of time to bum around the town and take in some pretty cool sights!! The first day
(Sunday)
was pretty much occupied with getting TO the hotel with all of the luggage and finding some eats and Justin sleeping off some jetlag!! The next day
(Monday)
we were ready to go through, and after jumping a turnstile to get on the RER train into the city because we didn't have the right tickets...oops...(we were in a suburb called Rosny-Sous-Bois) - we then headed up to Montmartre to get our picture drawn in the Artists' Quarter, which is something I've always wanted to get done with someone!! Here's 2 pics of that experience...
Justin had to sit first...
...and then it was my turn!
Afterwards we ate in a little café along the artists' area and spent some time gazing down at the city from Sacre Coeur (Sacred Heart) which is a cathedral on top of a hill which offers a GREAT view of Paris...the 2nd highest point if I remember right. Then we hopped on the metro and headed down to the river Seine to take a look at the island that Notre Dame is on and walk down towards Luxombourg Garden...unfortunately it started raining on us, but we hopped in a little internet cafe for 30 minutes and then it was done! Had a great walk through the garden (note - gardens in France are NOTHING like in Minnesota...you'll see later) and then headed back to the hotel to get ready for the show at the
MOULIN ROUGE!!!!!
Here's me outside the Moulin Rouge before getting in line to go to the show. We went to the 11pm show, and it was a good 2 hrs long. Awesome thing is that we had seats RIGHT NEXT TO THE STAGE!! I cannot even explain how cool it was!!! The dancers' hair and dresses and feet were right in your face... it was more than cool. NOT to mention the fact that justin got to go ON STAGE during the ventriliquist's act!!! The guy picked 4 ppl from the couple thousand there, and lucky Justin got to go up!! I was laughing so hard I was crying. :)
Justin and I just outside the door right after the show. Unfortunately it was kind of a dark pic. :P
Justin and I outside the place a couple days later..we went back to get our free ashtrays, just cuz they say MoulinRouge on them!!!
Anywho, now we're to
Tuesday
... pretty tired that morning because we didn't get home from our 70 euro taxicab ride until 2am, but we had a mission for the day - the Dday Beaches of Normandy! Definitely something that everyone should see. It's the 60th anniversary this year, so it's even cooler. I booked us a half-day tour of the landing beaches and cemetary from
normandywebguide.com and they were absolutely awesome. A guy on our tour was even from Willmar!! How small-world is that??
The American Cemetary...Forrest Gump was actually shot here cuz it was too hard to recreate!! It's really moving to see in real life the thousands of graves, and it's only a small percentage of the ppl who died there because most were sent back home.
This is Pont du Hoc... you can see how the bombs absolutely devastated the earth here...Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, etc. are on either side of this place. That's justin in the red sweatshirt - it was absolutely freezing that day and raining off and on!!
The Dday beaches trip took up the whole day - got back into town about 9pm, had some KFC for supper (yeah, kinda pathetic, but it was delicious!) and conked out...
Wednesday
...we met up with Amanda Mahanna (another student from Cord who's here for the semester with me) and headed out to see le château de Versailles... an absolutely gorgeous castle just outside of Paris where the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress JOSEPHINE lived (not to mention a bunch of other kings!). The only picture I uploaded is one view of the gardens that just stretch on forever and ever at this place...
Pretty impressive huh?
Got back into town about 8pm and ate munchies and drank a few beers with Greta and Dave in the hotel to wind down for the night.
Thursday
was our musuem day - we headed to the Louvre first
(click here) before heading over to the Musée d'Orsay (my mom's favorite cuz they have a lot of Monets!) and then going to the Arc de Triomphe to go to the top and see down the Champs Elysees...the most famous "street" in Paris.
Straight down from where we were standing is a huge roundabout that's 12 lanes wide - it was absolutely mesmerizing to watch the traffic try to naviagte around the place!!!
After that we headed into the Latin Quarter to have a great supper which lasted the traditional 2 hrs before calling it a night!
Friday
... This was an icky morning cuz we had to switch hotels from the east-side suburbs to the west, and that took up the whole morning! The afternoon was spent looking at Notre Dame (sorry, i took pics on my regular camera instead of the digital) and Saint Chapelle, which is a great example of gothic architecture.
Check out these stained glass windows!!!
Then we headed back up to the redlight district to get our ashtrays from the Moulin Rouge (long story, but we ended up killing like 2 hrs there to get them!!) and got some groceries to make our own sandwiches and save some money on supper for the night!
Saturday
we went back up to the Montmartre area to the artists' quarter cuz justin wanted his own drawing done. It turned out awesomely, and afterwards we took the subway (called the "metro") down to the Seine and got on one of the tourist boats that do trips up and town the river. Here's a pic of Justin with the Eiffel Tower in the background!!!
Wearing his new shirt from Celio. :)
That evening we ended up sitting having drinks with a British couple in the Latin quarter before running over to go up the Eiffel Tower for our last night there! We took the stairs so we only went to the 2nd level, but that was a LOT of stairs, believe me!! Lol... headed back to our hotel after that, where the fire alarm proceeded to go off TWICE for minutes on end...made for a not so restful night for sure!!!
The next day we headed on to Rennes...my town!!!
