Our hotel gave us a really nice map of the city. We used that instead of the ones we had yesterday because, truth be told, they kind of sucked.
Woke up without alarms and felt refreshed as daisies in spring. Then we ate our free breakfast at the hotel which consisted of breads, two types of cereal, coffee and tea, yougurt, and croissants. Oh the croissants. Ryan fell in love with the croissants. I fell in love with the baguettes. I love baguettes.
Attempted to take the Metro to Notre Dame, but we couldn't figure out how to open the doors when the train was at our station so we got off a station later. Bummer. But it was more of the city we got to see. Really, more of the city, because I thought we were on the right side of the river so I led us the wrong way down the river. So we had to turn around and walk the other way for two metro stops. Or was it three? We probably realized we were going the wrong way when we came upon the next bridge and saw that it wasn't the bridge we expected to see. Whoops.
But we got to Notre Dame and took pictures in the back garden for a few minutes. It's free to get in so that's what we did after looking at it from the square out front. It was really pretty. Such a pretty church. Cathedral. Such a pretty cathedral. Sorry, churches are tiny. Cathedrals are HUGE, like this one. Anyway, it was gorgeous and Ryan took more pictures than I did because I've seen cathedrals before in other parts of Europe. We spent maybe an hour there just looking around. I got a souvenir medallion thing for Sarah and bought a packet of postcards from the gift shop because you couldn't buy them individually.
After that, we went to the Louvre. For the record, the Louvre is not just HUGE, it's GIANORMOUS! The Louvre is located in the old palace before one of the Kind Louies moved the royal family to Versailles. It's been filled with ancient artifacts the world over since Napoleon's days, I believe. I think he was the one who put his spoils of conquest in the Louvre and that's how it started as a museum. Since then, it's been holding spoils of the world both ancient and recent. Mostly art, though. We saw a lot of sculptures and paintings and I discovered the difference between French paintings and German paintings are the way faces are drawn and the use of colors. German paintings tend to have more dark colors where French paintings are really light and colorful. Of course, we got to see the Mona Lisa and her famous smile. Not up close and personal, though. She has this barricade around her to prevent people from getting too close and she has a glass covering so no one can easily steal her. Then there was the mass amount of people surrounding her that was another prevention of closeness with the good Lisa. But we got pictures with each other anyway. Ryan took a picture of me attempting to mimic her smile, but I just look bored.
I have a theory on the Mona Lisa. People always ask who she is and what's with her smile? It's so mysterious. Back in high school, when I drew more than I do now, I used to draw people just for the sake of it. I sort of used it as a practice to get proportions and shapes right. Sometimes I would finish the pictures and color it in and everything. More often than not, though, it would go unfinished into the bowels of my sketchbook. And that's what I think the Mona Lisa is. Leo Da Vinci just wanted to paint a picture of just some random person that doesn't exist because he wanted to get all the proportions right and play with color and shading and other painter techniques. But that's my theory. Dispute it as you will.
We walked on and took pictures of our favorite pieces. While in sculptures, we copied the poses of the ones we liked for pictures. I find that a fun pasttime -- mimicking statues. Gives you a fun reason to take a picture with something boring.
Somewhere along the way, Ryan's ankle started to hurt him. As in, really hurt him. He wasn't limping, but he kept complaining about it and we often sat down just to rest and he could massage his foot. What was going on, neither of us knew. Maybe he tripped. Maybe he stepped on something wrong. Neither of us know what really happened, just that he somehow hurt his ankle and it affected us the rest of the day. For a bit, though. We still walked nearly everywhere.
Stopped in a cafe in the Louvre to get something to eat. Anything worthy enough to be considered a meal was too pricey for us, especially me who has seen sandwiches of that size for a lot less in my day. Instead, we munched on Ben and Jerry's ice cream and I got a mini baguette roll thing when I was finished. They looked so good! And they were less than one Euro! I just had to get one.
We stayed in the Louvre until it closed. We mostly saw paintings, but there were a few sculptures and some Greek/Roman mythology. When we walked outside, it was already quite dark out.
The pyramid marking the Grand Entrance of the Louvre was the winning idea in a contest some years back. The winner was a Chines American who proposed "I'm going to make an invisible pyramid! And you don't be able to see it because it'll be invisible." (It sounded ridiculous while on the tour too.) Anyway, during the construction of this "invisible pyramid", the glass kept breaking. So they had to reinforce it with steel and made the invisible pyramid a lot more visible than intended. Whoops.
The plan then was to head over to the Eiffel Tower and go up on top to see all the pretty Parisian lights. Both of us were willing to pay the 13EUR for the elevator ride to the top because neither one wanted to walk up stairs. Besides, Ryan's foot hurt a lot. We ended up walking to the tower because we thought it was closer than the map said it was. Such lies. The map lied to us! It took us forever to get there! We took enough pictures of the Eiffel Tower to fill the Louvre with them! I swear.
All pillars of the tower were cloes when we got there. At first, we thought it was because it was late at night. But it turns out it was because it was snowing and they close the observation deck or something when the weather is bad. (We learned this the next day when we came back again, but more on that later). This was a bummer. But we stuck around and dodged the sketchy figurine sellers so we could get some more pictures from the park and catch a video of the tower glittering.
DID YOU KNOW?
The Eiffel Tower sparkles for five minutes every hour on the hour as soon as it's dark. It's very pretty.
While attempting to catch video of it, Ryan's camera ran out of battery power. The batteries he had brought over from the States were too old or something. They were faulty nonetheless and he was very upset he didn't get an HD quality video. We figured we'd find a place that sells batteries somewhere, but our priority by this time was food so that's what we set off to get.
I wanted to find someplace away from Tourist Town for the cheaper prices and more authentic meal, but Ryan kept complaining about hunger and his foot so we stopped short of what I wanted and compromised at a small restaurant a block or two away from Avenue de Champs. The prices weren't bad, I guess. When compared to American dollars, the prices were atrocious, but when compared to other parts of Paris, they were all right. I had a lovely 3-cheese penne dish and Ryan had his lasangne. We asked where we could get batteries, our waiter called over someone with better English than him, and we managed to hear about a store that would sell batteries we could get. This new waiter thought we wanted batteries from the restuarant at first. We knew they wouldn't sell batteries, but we got our point across nonetheless. So once we finished eating, we headed off in that direction.
We thought the store the waiter mentioned was a small pharmacy. I suppose our basis of thought was along the lines of "Wal-Greens/Boots is a pharmacy that sells batteries. Let's look in here." No go for that one. Then we discovered Avenue de Champs and a giant electronics store in the basement of a shopping center. I think I walked in to see what it was like and Ryan followed, and we found good ol' Energizer in the camera department. We got the big pack (just to make sure) and quickly left to return to the Eiffel Tower. Ryan was getting that glitter video and nothing was going to stop him -- not even a foot.
We dodged some more wandering street vendors, peacefully ignored the soldiers with guns (What do they have machine guns for? To fight off the enemy? Who's the enemey? THE ENEMY!), and even helped a few couples take pictures of them with the tower in the background. Then Ryan got his video. With that, we figured out a route back to the hotel via metro and went to bed soon after. We didn't watch any TV that night, I don't think. We were both tired and we had to get up earlier because we had to check out and figure out when to get to the train station and such. So once we were ready to sleep, we slept.
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