So Paris was Paris

Keeping up my tradition of starting with a picture:

This is a view from the top of the hill in Montemarte, looking out over Paris at night. I would love to take credit for meaning to take this picture, but it just sort of happened as I was fiddling with the manual settings.

Phil went home to Michigan, so it was Veronica and I in Paris this weekend. We caught the 7am train from Lyon on Friday morning so we could have most of the day. I would say we were just about as "touristy" as we could have been in our selection of places to go, but that is to be expected in a place like Paris. The first thing we did, after dropping off our bags at the hotel, was go out to Versailles. The reason being our rail passes. If you don't already know, you can buy a rail pass very cheaply in Europe. The way it works is you buy days of travel. I got 8 travel days in France, Italy and Spain for under 400$. Those 8 train tickets would have easily cost me 1200$. And you can travel as far as you want in one day, even if it means multiple trains, and just use one day on your pass. So we went to Versailles on Friday because it would be free, since we were already traveling from Lyon, get it? So we got back to the hotel around 3 and decided to rest a little before we went to the Louvre, around 7, with 3 hours before it closed. We got lost in there. But that's a good thing at the Louvre. It is a magical place and probably my favorite part of my Paris trip. I became a fan of Horace Vernet and his seascapes. I don't think I've ever been able to walk around a museum for 3 hours and not feel like collapsing. We slept well Friday night.

Saturday was a day of walking. I can still feel it in my legs. We started with the Eiffel tower. That took about 3 hours to get to the top. All I can say is wow, what a view. Not much else to say about that. We then walked to the Cathedral at Notre Dame . I felt kind of trapped on Saturday because these are things you "have" to do in Paris, but they're just sights to me. Maybe I was just tired from walking and not in a mood to enjoy it. Then things picked up when we went to dinner. There are many great restaraunts around Notre Dame, so I guess it's the competition that drives the prices down. Our meal was only 12 Euros each, thats very cheap. I got Tzatziki followed by stuffed sweet pepper with rice and potatoe. I think I almost fainted from the deliciousness:

It doesn't look quite as delicious as it was. But the important thin is that you remember the restaurant Meteora if you go to Paris. There was also live music with a guy playing a bluesy guitar that I very much enjoyed.

Sunday we started with the Arc du Triomphe. The might have been more fun that the Eiffel Tower, just might. Then we slowly made our way through the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries where we ended up back at the Louvre around 6ish. There is a fun little fair next to the Louvre and we went on the ferris wheel and felt like we were back in America at the State Fair for a few minutes. By Sunday night we were tired of walking, that's when we decided to see "The Hangover". You might be wondering why we didn't leave Paris on Sunday. One unforunate thing about the rail passes is that you have to get a reservation for most big trains and there are a limited number. When we went to the train station 2 weeks before we found out that there were no available reservations for Sunday trains so we had to go back Monday. The only problem with that was that we had an 8:30am ChemE lab on Monday. That meant we had to take the 5:50am train to Lyon. That was not fun.

Besides having to wake early to go to and leave from Paris, I thouroughly enjoyed my visit there and all of the sights. It was nice to have a more low key weekend after the previous weekend in Amsterdam. Now I hope my leg muscles will recover before I leave for Italy on Wednesday.