Bienvenue Paris

I love stark contrasts like this... England and France are separated by a narrow channel and yet they might as well be on opposite sides of an ocean.

We arrived this morning on the Eurostar train from London. Brownie and I slept the entire time, literally being woken up by the conductor alerting us that we were minutes from arriving in Paris. Everything is different; the architecture is completely... Parisian... long ornate buildings with beautiful balconies everywhere. The language of course is different (I certainly miss English).

After finding our hotel this morning at our hotel in North Paris, we dropped our bags and got going. We bought a Carnet, a pass good for 10 trips on the Métro, and set out for the Eiffel Tower. 20 minutes later, after we emerged from the subway, the tower was out in front of us. It was truly incredible. There are things in this world that you see in pictures your entire life... to be able to actually see it with your own eyes and stand in front of it is a truly awesome experience. The Eiffel tower has always been something I have wanted to see... It was so great to finally be there. We walked down to the tower, underneath it and played some hacky sack on the lawn in its shadow.

We walked all the way from the tower to the Arc d'Triomphe and the Champs-Ellyses. We walked all along the famous avenue, stopping for a typical French baguette lunch, eaten on a park bench on the side of the road. After more walking, we finally headed back north to check in to our hotel.

When we arrived at our metro station, we got hopelessly lost in a not-so-great part of town. We walked for awhile, trying to get our bearings straight. We finally decided to just head back to the main train station (because we knew how to get home from there). It was a tense few minutes as we tried to figure out where the hell we were, but we kept our cool. Later in the day, we would find out that we had popped out of the subway literally like 20 yards from our hotel but didn't realize it and headed in the opposite direction. Woops.

This evening, we went to Sacre-Cœur, the huge Catholic Cathedral in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. It is set up on a huge hill overlooking the city and is absolutely gorgeous. We set up shop at the base of hill and had a great dinner watching the light slowly go down on the structure above us. 4 glasses of wine later, we headed up the steps toward the huge church.

When we got up there and looked behind us, the entire city was sprawled out before us, the sun hitting it as it was setting. It was truly a great sight.

























Talk tomorrow!

Greg