I wrote this post yesterday in the park by the eifle tower:
Today is now our 4th and final day in Paris and we have accomplished a lot in our time here.
We arrived at around 3:00 p.m. on the 3rd. After find our hostel, st. Christophers, we got right back onto the metro and began touring the city. We started with the Arc de Triomphe. The arc stands right in the middle of the craizest part of road I have ever seen. The roundabout around the arc is as many as 5 lanes wide, but there are no lanes and the drivers are crazy. Luckily we spotted the nice underground tunnel to get to the arc, which is impressive to see in person. From the are we walked through a park and along the tour de France route (the tour is not here while we are, but the seats for the spectators are setup.) to the obelesque (sp?) which, we learned today, is where the guillotine was during the French Revolution. This is also where the finish to the tour de France is. Here we first spotted the Eifle Tower and made our way there. The tower is huge and very cool looking, but the wide open parks around it were my favorite part of the area. After quite a bit of walking we took the metro back to our hostel and called it a night.
On our second day here we conquered even more. We started out taking the metro the the Louvre. The museum is enourmous, and we chose to go on the first Sunday of the month which draws a very large crowd becuase it is free. We hopped into the line where they told us it would be 2 hours until we got in. We were ready to wait in the huge line for that long, but it actually only took 40 minutes to get in. The museum was definitely packed, but we pushed through the crowds to see what we wanted: the Mona lisa, the last supper, Venus de Milo, Cupid, and much more. The museum was completely overwhelming, not only becuase of the crowds, but becuase of the shear size of the place. Our tour guide told us today that if you stretched it out with all the floors it would be 8 miles long. After fighting the crowds at the Louvre, we ate some lunch at a nice little cafe. The crepe in Paris are delicious. When we finished our lunch we headed to Notre Dame on the metro. The cathedral looks beatiful on the inside and the outside. Finally after hitting most of the biggest spots in Paris we rode the metro back to the hostel and took a nap. After waking up we began the constant tour again and found a nice place to eat in the Latin Quarter. The croque Madame, and croque Monsieur were delightful. When we finished our meal we walked around the latin quarter a little more before returning to the hostel to meet up with Luke who was returning from Sweden. He arrived to and has now joined us on our adventure.
Day three began with packing up all our stuff and moving to another hostel. This hostel was a little far from the city center, and that must have been why it was the cheapest of the trip. After dropping off our bags we connected to a different RER (the express trains that run out of the downtown area) that ran to Versailles. the palace and gardens are again overwhelming like the Louvre. We walked through the gardens for a good 4-5 hours and still did not come close to covering it all. Becky probably saw the most when she snuck in with a tour group to see a gated off fountain. When we got back on the RER we thought we had time to make it back to our hotel and then to the Eifle tower for our night bike tour. After running to and through a couple metro stations we missed our fat tire bike tour and this created the first real problem of the trip. We called the tour company and they told us we could take the tour tomorrow in the morning for afternoon. This was when we were planning our day trip to Normandy, but that trip ended up being too difficult to make.
This bring me to today, the 6th of July. We woke up and took the RER back into Paris. We stopped off at the train station we leave for Barcelona from tonight, locked up our bags, and this time made it to our Fat Tire bike tour. Our group decided that we would highly reccommend this tour to anyone in Paris. Our tourguide Max was very entertaining and the tour gave us some great history of the buildings we visited this week for example where Napolean is buried, where the French revolution began, and te bridge that was constructued from the rubble oxygen Bastille.
The true traveling of the trip has begun and although there has been a few detours and speed bumps I feel we are dominating and would definitely be onthe front of the pack on the Amazing Race. It is still surreal that we are here, and that I am writing this entry while sitting in a park under the Eifle Tower. Tomorrow we will be in Spain!
(once again this was typed on the iPhone, so sorry for any errors/ typos)
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