Au revoir Paris

Day three started out really sunny and with lots of promise as we took a metro trip to La Defense which is the downtown Paris working area. Lots of futuristic highrise buildings like any other downtown location and I can see it being really packed and bustling on a work day. A train ride back to the city center and a walk around Les Halles which has a really huge shopping mall but with boring chain stores we can find over in the States.  At night Les Halles has a strip of clubs and bars and a bit of seediness thrown in for those with much energy to spare after walking around the city all day.  A walk through the grounds of the Louvre museum and Jardin des Tuileries which is supposed to be a really great centrally located garden but there was barely any green so calling it a garden was a bit of a stretch. The tour ended at Place de la Concorde and the obelisk which is a huge gold topped obelisk taken from the Egyptians by Napoleon during his reign.

At night we took a dinner boat ride with the Bateaux-Mouches company along the Seine.  This was by no means cheap as it involved a 4 course dinner, a bottle of champagne and wine and I am sure there are cheaper dinner tours available if we had done the research but it was a nice dinner and the views of all the major monuments along the Seine…whew, you just can’t take too many pictures of the Eiffel tower especially when it is all lit up at night. Absolutely beautiful.  The buildings along the Seine are historic but fabulous architecture and it is sometimes hard to believe they have stood for thousands of years.

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Springtime in Paris

Back to my first day-we went to the Eiffel Tower which is just really spectacular.  It was really tall (imagine that) and being March, the lines for the elevators to the top were not horribly long. The view from the top is worth it because you can see in every single direction the entire city. The one negative is because it is so high, a lot of the monuments are really tiny and far away and you almost need binoculars to see details.

 The next day started out with a trip to Musee D’Orsay which used to be an old train station that was turned into a museum. It is just the prettiest place ever with open space down the middle and the artwork in rooms off to the side.  Next a walk along the Seine River to Notre Dame Cathedral. 

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France Trip One

This is titled “Trip 1″ because from the moment I touched down at Charles De Gaulle airport, on a rainy morning in Paris, I knew it would not be my last trip.

 

Paris is beautiful! Hands down. The city is nicely arrayed into 20 arrondisements which are like neighborhoods in the United States. Except arrondisements don’t really mean much if you’re there because most people get around on the metro (subway). Paris has got to have the best public transportation of any big city I’ve been to. I did not even get to try the buses as I was on the metro train -or walking- the entire time I was there but it was so easy and efficient to use. Everywhere you need to get to is close to a train station. You can buy tickets for one trip, the entire day, or an entire week.  You can probably buy tickets for longer periods of time if you live there but I didn’t delve that deep. 

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