I hate stairs. We walked up, down, and across so many stairs today; I'm not sure how I'm still awake. It's probably the crepe we had an hour ago. Lol.
Our day started slowly. We got out by 10 and headed to breakfast. Pancakes and orange juice from a cute cafe called Lockwood (I almost spelled this Lickwood...tired) was our yummy food. The cafe was actually recommended by Sandra, our host while in Paris.
Then we headed to the Norte Dame Cathedral. It was magnificent.
The front.
The inside.
Pretty statues. Lots of pretty statues.
One of the doorways.
Around the outside.
We then decided to do the tower. The wait was about an hour and a half.
Waiting.
The wait was worth it. It was beautiful. Only downfall was that they put up wire mesh to keep people from falling/jumping. Am I the only one who doesn't see a problem with that? Darwin, baby. And hey...now someone gets to have a job: clean up.
Gargoyle.
I will spew molten fire at you!
The bells of Notre Dame!
Then we went down into the archeological crypts below. They house remains from medieval times.
Really cool digs. 😜
After that, we headed down to the Musèe d'Orsay. It's actually in an old train station. Turns out, most of the museums are housed in buildings that were built for a different purpose.
Monet.
Renoir.
One guess.
Can you guess this one? Hint: we saw his museum in Amsterdam a few days a-Gogh. 😇
After the Orsay, we walked over to the Luxor Obelisk, an Egyptian artifact.
This baby is over 3000 years old. I really wanted to touch it.
And then we continued our long ass walk (because the 1000+ stairs weren't enough) to the Arc de Triomphe.
The Arc.
Oh hey look! More stairs.
The view from the top.
Brad was super excited about his new toy. You could scroll through photos of architecture that were displayed on the screen and they were also projected onto a miniature of the Arc. Cool.
From the Arc, we went back to the Eiffel Tower. This time, however, we took a page from some of the locals and walked next to the Seine. It was gorgeous. Seriously. People should open up some boat bars; they'd make bank. We found a spot on the Trocadero and sat to watch the Eiffel twinkle.
Brad haggled the price of a very cheap bottle of wine down from 35€ to 10€. The salesman would not go away until we bought. Very annoying. In this photo, I told Brad I wanted to take a picture of him drinking his prize. I kept taking photos though, so he had to keep drinking. 😈 This is the last photo; as you can tell, he's barely keeping it together.
The twinkle of the tower happens for the first four minutes of the hour after darkness falls.
I had to use the bathroom so I walked across the street and used the bathroom at the first place we ate in Paris. I also bought a crepe to share with Brad.
This is on the walk to the potty. Pretty tower.
A long, good day in Paris.