Well Paris is a mixture of things so far! When we arrived on the late train everythnig was closed including the tourist office to get a map, so after being greeted outside to the overwhelming smell of urine we found our way to a txi that took us to our hotel. We found out after getting a map there that the walk from the station was only about 500 metres. Ah well.
Yesterday we got out to see the city...it is absolutely massive! You get no feeling from a map just how big it is and after spending a solid 6 hours walking we experienced this first hand. Firstly had a look around our area - and decided best to stay away from it as much as possible! Very handy to the train station and metro though. Once we got into the main part of the city it was really nice - still pretty dirty as they throw their rubbish anywhere, but still a certain charm in the nice parts.
Did a walk by the Notre Dame - but the queue was massive so decided we need to do an early morning for that one. The building is amazing from the outside, and agani massive.
We then headed over to the Lourve and went to look at the standards...the Monna Lisa and Venus de Milo, but there are heaps of other amazing collections that are very well done, probably spent an hour and a half looking around. The building itself is beautiful without any of the artifacts in it, and the scale of it is mind blowing - you could easily spend 2 days there and not see everything.
After that we headed towards the Arc de Triumph down the Champs Elysees but it never got any closer so we decided to change direction to the Eiffel Tower. The structure of this standing underneath it is very impressive to say the least! After looking at those queues we thought it would be nice to go and have some dinner and go up it at night - when we went back we discovered everyone else had the same idea and the queues were worse, so settled for watching the lights come on from the Trocadero which was lovely. They light it up and then put twinkling flashing lights all over it so it looks like it is glittering!
The wine and cheese here are gorgeous....but we thought Amsterdam was expensive for food - it has nothing on Paris! We went for a wander to suss out where the Moulin Rouge is as we are headed there tonight, and went through the red light district (which it is in the middle of) and thought it was pretty tame - felt safer there than around our hotel!
We ate at a really classy Karaoke Restaurant listening to a group of Asians singing 'Braze of Grory'!
Enjoyed watching the ABs game this morning over breakfast with a pub full of French... and a couple of other Kiwis. They are definitely passionate about their rugby!
So far the people have been relatively nice, Sara has been giving her very pigeon French a go, and we haven't eaten anything we don't recognise so must be doing ok. They speak crazy fast though so we are doing a lot of nodding, smiling and saying Oui!
Au revoir for now!
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