Saturday May 17th, 2008

Ben,

It is 4AM and Matt and I are waking up for our weekend in Paris!! I open up the curtain and can’t believe the sun is already peaking over the horizon. I remember back to our visit in November when it was pitch black by 5:30 and the sun didn’t rise till well after 8. Now, you have day light until almost 10PM. The weather is really starting to shine on us.

Anyway, our flight leaves at 7:20AM and we are in Paris within an hour. We head straight for the hotel which lets us check in super early. It isn’t much, but has a great view the bed is comfortable, so I can’t complain. It’s time for the sightseeing to begin. PARIS is beautiful! It really is everything I had imagined and more! And the food… AMAZING! We learned from our trip to Rome, and this time we make sure we have a good map of the city so that we don’t get lost. From the hotel, we walk through the garden of Luxembourg, to the Pantheon and have lunch (snails for an appetizer).

We walk through the Latin Quarter to Notre Dame where they are having some type of bread festival.

From Notre Dame we made our way to the Louvre,

through the Jardin des Tuileries to Champs-Elysees that lead us to the Arc de Triomphe.

This was the only tour Matt and I decided to do while in Paris due to time. So we climbed inside the Arc to the top where we had a great view of the city and the Eiffel Tower.

Our favorite part of the day was sitting on top of a wall overlooking the Palais de Challot and the Eiffel Tower.

Of course we ended this long journey under the Eiffel Tour. Here is where our day didn’t go quite as planned… It is almost 5PM and we have purchased tickets for one of the night cruises down the Seine River to see Paris at night. The last boat leaves at 10 PM. We are headed to the hotel to freshen up for dinner, when we get caught in the rain without an umbrella. We stop under a tree which protects us for a bit, but soon the water is coming through the tree. So we make a run for it…

now drenched, we head to the hotel to try to blow-dry our clothes off :) Still a little damp, we make our way back to the Latin Quarter for dinner and catch a cab to the port barely in time to catch the last boat… but we made it!

Nightlife in Paris: If there is any, we didn’t find any. Similar to Rome everyone enjoys wine with dinner and stays at the restaurant with friends until all hours. However, there aren’t bars or pubs like we are used to.