Monday, November 15, 2010

Paris in the fewest words possible

If I am going to keep this short, this is gonna be really a summary of what we did. We were only gone for two nights, but still, seems like we managed to fit in a fair amount of stuff.
We left the Saturday the started my week long vacation for All Saint's Day, and arrived in Paris mid-afternoon. We missed out on the Palace de Versaille thanks to too much traffic, so instead we headed straight for the Arc de Triomphe. After a being let loose at the Arc for a bit of free time in Paris, we returned for dinner which was followed by a nighttime tour in bus of Paris - we saw the Eiffel Tower and the twinkling light show it puts one for two minutes every hour, we saw the Seine, drove past the Louvre, the Ritz, the Notre Dame, and many other famous places whose names I have already forgotten.
Sunday we had a continental breakfast in our hotel, but they served croissants and pain au chocolat! I spent my morning taking a semi-guided walk around Paris to see many of the same well-known areas in the daylight. We ate lunch under the Louvre before heading on into that overwhelming museum. Dinner followed, which was itself followed by a short boat ride on the Seine at night. The boat ride ended at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, and the group them went to the top (by elevator, not by foot) and had a beautiful view of Paris at night. We took the metro back to the hotel, got slightly lost and made it back around 12:30.
The next day we made two final stops before heading on home - Notre Dame and the Sacre Coeur - two beautiful (and understandably famous) churches. We ate a thoroughly American lunch at Hard Rock Cafe and headed on home (by tour bus, the same way we arrived in France).