Day 2

Today was another day of lots of excitement!  Matt and I were up for breakfast and preparing for the day around 9.  The first thing we decided to do was see the Eiffel Tower, so we walked over to the subway, bought a day pass (which was not the easiest task to do when everything is in French) and made our way over. We didn’t go to the stop closest to it, but instead picked one where the tour guide told us was a nice viewing point. It definitely was! Our photo taking lead us closer and closer to the tower until finally we were right underneath it looking at the people lined up to go inside. We decided to wait in the line while deciding whether we were going to go up the Eiffel Tower, or make our way over to another tall tower for a nice view of Paris. We ended up choosing to stay at the Eiffel Tower, so while I was in line waiting, Matt looked around to make sure we were in the right line and see where the other lines went. He noticed that the line for tickets to take the stairs up the tower rather than the elevators was much smaller, so we decided to trek up the stairs in order to save time and be able to see more of Paris. By this point it had started to rain and people were turning back and heading for cover. We stayed where we were and got through the line in about 15 minutes!

The stairs weren’t actually too bad to climb. There were a lot of them but we were too excited to really notice them. The views were stunning and it brought back a lot of memories from my trip in highschool. I was so happy to be able to share the experience with Matt J.

After the tower, we grabbed some late lunch/early dinner at a Chinese restaurant (which ended up just being buffet foods microwaved, but still didn’t taste bad) and checking out the Louvre. The Louvre was closing in 45 min by the time we got there, so we decided it wouldn’t be worth the admission for the short time. We wandered around the area, took lots of pictures and then decided to check out Jim Morrisons grave at the cemetery.

We almost got there on time to enter before the gates closed, but ended up being distracted by a parade happening right on the street we were walking down. We stopped and watched as zumba dancers and people from all ethnicities came down the street, dancing to all sorts of different music. It was really cool to watch. Matt asked someone what was going on and he said “Carnival!”. We spent quite a lot of time there enjoying the performance. Afterwards, we got back to the cemetery which was long since closed, but we took pictures of eachother headbanging at the cemetery gates since it reminded us of the Pantera song.

We wanted to see the Eiffel Tower at night and how it lit up and had some time to kill before dark, so we decided to head back to Notre Dame to see if there were any street performers or anything interesting going on. As it turned out there wasn’t too much, so we went for another walk to check out interesting statues and buildings in the area before going back to the tower.

We finished off the evening sitting on the stairs in front of the Eiffel tower, eating crepes and just enjoying the amazing view. When the tower lit up it glowed a bronze colour at first and then started to sparkle. It was amazing to see and really the perfect way to end a night in Paris.

Afterwards, we hopped back on the tube, transferred a couple times and came back to the hotel for showering, blogging, uploading pictures to the computer (just in case anything happens to the camera) and getting ready for tomorrow.