Wednesday, June 8th
Seeing everything there is to see in Paris in 6 hours...
Tuesday night we fell asleep quickly, we had been up for over 19 hours without any sleep.
Our goal was to be up by 8 or 9 so we could go to the major sites in Paris.
Unfortunately, both Matt and I slept through my alarm clock and we didn't wake up until almost 11am.
We hurried to get ready, left the hostel, stopped at a cafe and picked up some baquette sandwhiches and threw in our backpacks for lunch and tried to start on our day.
Our first stop was the Lourve. Now, the Lourve is huge (most of us know that) and even seeing it I was like "ok, wow, that's huge..." so it was never my intention to actually go through it. We bought Paris Musuem passes which got us into almost every Paris attraction, so the goal was to pretty much just check it out, see the famous works.
Once inside the place is a maze and zoo. The maps provide some assistance, but you are pretty much lost the minute you walk in the door. However there are signs everywhere pointing to the Mona Lisa (well, they are in French but they show a picture of the painting and an arrow showing the direction, so we could figure it out) so that is where we headed. We got there, and it was pretty cool, mainly just because its so famous and well known. There was a huge crowd around it, everyone getting their picture taken. Afterwards I can't remember what we saw, two famous statues but by that time I had had enough.
Just way too much for this trip. It is the largest collection in the world and it has over 30,000 pieces. I was overwhelmed at the Vatican, which had around 12,000 pieces of artwork!
So we sat outside the Lourve and ate our baguettes picnic style, because that is what you do in Paris. Then we walked down along the Siene and across to the Musee D'Orsay
Now THIS was a fabulous musuem. It had 3 floors full of exhibits, mainly paintings. But this musuem was doable. We spent about two hours there, with the majority of our time being spent in the Impressionst collection. It was amazing... so many famous, recognizable paintings in one place. While I didn't see very much of the Lourve, for general tourists it is definitely overrated. The Musee D'Orsay has all the paintings you would want to see-- Van Goghs, Degas, Renoir, Monets, etc.
Afterwards we strolled along the Siene towards Notre Dame Cathedral. All along the river there are booths with people selling paintings, prints, drawings, etc. which offers many distractions.
The cathedral was beautiful, like all the others that we have seen. At this point they are all sort of running together. There was a place to climb up to the top, but there was a huge line and since we were going to the top of the Arc de Triumph and the Eiffel tower, we figured we could go without the view.
By this time we were pleased that we had seen the three major things we had wanted to see, even though we overslept. We strolled through the Latin District some more, looking at souvenier shops and watching street performers. We stopped to have some food ... banana and nutella crepes... hmmmm...
Close to sunset we took the metro to the Arc de Triumph to go to the top-- however if I had known we were going to have to CLIMB to the top... I may have opted out. Now, I have nothing against stairs. It is the SPIRAL stairs that are narrow and steep that are killing me. The climb to the top of the arc was all stairs, and there were 250 of them.
I may have failed to mention that all of our hostels have been up several flights of stairs.
In rome, we were on the 5th floor (but they start with 0, so it was really the 6th) and there was a service lift or elevator that we were able to use sometimes, but other than that we climbed.
In Prauge we were on the fourth floor-- no lift. Had to carry our backpacks up those.
In Paris, definitely the worse. Narrow SPIRAL stairs up to the 6th floor I believe (over 80 steps-- I counted)
After walking all over town for 8-14 hours, climbing those stairs are EXCRUTIATING.
anyways so the view from the Arc was nice, the sun was setting.
afterwards the plan was to find food and then head to the Eiffel tower at dark.
Frommer's Paris 2004 told us the tower was open until midnight, so we found a place to eat and left for the tower sometime between 10:30-10:45. It took us about 15 mins on the metro, and another 15 mins to walk there.
To our dissapointment, especailly since it was my last night in Paris, the tower closed at 11:00pm. Frommer's was wrong.
So I did not get to go up in it.... but we did walk around by the base of it two nights in a row, and took lots of pictures.
Basically, we did Paris in one day. Afterwards we were exhausted. I am exhausted from traveling and going nonstop. I cannot wait to get home and sleep in my bed, with my comforter and pillows (and not a foam cushion, with no pillow or maybe no blankets)
But you know as soon as I am home and sleep awhile I will be ready to go again!
Ciao Ciao
|  | 
-france.jpg)
-france.jpg)
|
