Champagne, Baguettes & Berets!

I think I have fallen in love… again! Paris is incredible! I am still dreaming of champagne, berets and baguettes! We headed to Paris early Friday morning and took one of the last Eurostar trips out of London Waterloo (the international terminal has moved to Kings Cross St Pancras station)! When we arrived we caught the metro to the tube next to our hotel and as we came out of the underground the Arc de Triomphe was right above us – amazing! After finding our way to the hotel with the help of two lovely French men who didn’t speak a word of English, we checked in and then headed out to explore!

Our first stop was back to the Arc of Triomphe, once we dodged the gypsy women after our money we headed to the centre and climbed to the top! This was our first spy of the Eiffel tower, not to mention the rest of Paris…. Looking down over the roads off the roundabout that the Arc de Triomphe is in the middle of was amazing! We sat at the bottom for a little while and waited for an accident to occur on the worlds busiest roundabout (crazy I know) but statistically one occurs every 7 seconds! Well after a few minutes we had seen a fender bender and we headed off towards the Eiffel Tower!

We approached the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadero and it really is an amazing sight! After having some crazy photos we headed to the base of the tower and looked on in amazement, Shane spent a bit trying to figure out where exactly AJ Hackett placed the champagne bottle for his bungy jump. We carried on and wandered back to the hotel via Pont de Alma – this was where Princess Di died… very sad! We followed George V and the Champ Elysses back to the hotel and I dragged myself back while drooling in the windows of the Louis Vuitton, Yves St Laurent, Givenchy and Hermes…. If only I had a few grand to drop on a scarf!

We ended up having a pretty early night as we had had a rather big one the night before! The next day though we were up at the crack of dawn to head to the Louve, another absolutely incredible building – Paris is full of them and they blow your mind! Anyway we got there and skipped the queues (bonus) and once we were in headed straight to the Mona Lisa, not as big as I imagined but still very cool! We wander through the halls and enjoyed some of the works of art that were on the walls and the ceilings…. Then we headed to the Venus de Milo – again another amazing and incredibly old statute. There was definitely the possibility of spending days at the Lourve and we saw only a select few highlights!

We started strolling down the Seine towards Notre Dame and decided to stop and take a photo – as we were setting up the timer on the camera a van of French Police came along and kindly offered to take a photo – the guy thought he was a regular ANTM photographer and took half a roll (or memory card as the case may be) was fun though! We found our way to the island in the middle of the Seine and went to Saint Chapelle, this is an old gothic cathedral which housed biblical treasures many many moons ago…. The chapel was incredible, over 1600 stain glass windows depicting different biblical stories… We then moved on to the Notre Dame cathedral where we found the original centre of Paris – Point Zero! We went into the cathedral, this was enormous and while it is a fully operating cathedral it is incredibly touristy with hundreds of people filing through! We wandered back through the streets and purchased a few warmer wears before heading to Montemarte….

Montemarte is where the Moulin Rouge is located and is one of Paris’s red light districts, we walked through the cobbled streets which had a very Parisian feel to them and climbed a huge number of steps to get to Sacre Couer (Sacred Heart Church), this is not one of the more fabulous churches as far as overwhelming interiors go but it is on a hill and the views over Paris are absolutely amazing! On the way down while Shane was busy sightseeing I managed to find some street vendors and purchase a leather handbag… good times! I got a special price (yeah right) cos I was from NZ… he loved the All Blacks!

We headed back to the Eiffel tower that evening to go on a bike tour around Paris, this was great except Shane was the ‘Ass Man’, which meant he had to bring up the rear and make sure everyone could keep up! We had a number of Australian and America girls on there who were pretty boozed and struggled to stay on their bikes in the thick of Paris traffic… a little scary but we all got back in one piece! As part of this tour we had a cruise down the Seine where we got to see a few moons (as in the one in the sky and a couple of French bottoms – very funny!), we went passed the Eiffel Tower right on the hour when is starts glittering… it is so pretty and is just like millions of diamonds!

The next day we were a little later getting up but headed down to the Champ Elysses for the Remembrance Day parades, it was awesome even though we couldn’t understand a thing and didn’t know what was going on! The most striking thing for me was the enormous French flag that was flying in the Arc of Triomphe and the sheer number of people looking on in awe at what was going on! We headed for the tube after a bit and went out to Bastille where we found a food market, this had a heap of different stalls with breads, cheeses, fruit, seafood… all sorts of things for sale, we wandered through the crowds for a bit before stopping to buy some different things for a hurried picnic in the middle of the market. Rather than taking the tube back into the city centre we chose to walk… we wandered through the streets until we were on the Rue de Rivoli , I was keen to shop however that was not going to happen as everything was closed for remembrance day - bugger!

At the end of the Rue de Rivoli we hit Concorde which has a huge Ferris wheel in the middle… Shane bought us tickets and we went up in that to admire the view! It was pretty funny actually we went around about 5 times – it appeared that the ‘driver’ was on a smoke break and we were set to keep circulating until he was well and ready… am stoked it didn’t rain! We left Concorde and headed back to the hotel to get ready for our night out! We went via the Champ Elysses and even though hardly any shops were open the street was a nightmare and there were literally thousands of people moving around the place! We got back and got dressed up to go to dinner and the show! Pretty funny cos it was freezing and I didn’t have a dressy coat and only a nice skirt… not that well prepared really!

Dinner was at Altitude 95 which is on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, the meal was nice and we met a couple of plods from Northern Ireland, they were good value! After the mean we had the option to go on a cruise down the Seine but decided to go to the top of the tower instead – well worth it! Apparently the queues can be up to 2 hours if you start from the bottom but being that we were already on the first floor we didn’t have to wait! When we got to the top I felt a bit ridiculous standing up there in the howling wind freezing while 15 bus loads of Asian tourists rugged up big time were looking on at me with a look that can only be interpreted as ‘what a silly woman!’…. I felt like an idiot but it had to be done and I am glad we saw Paris by night from the top! We also realised exactly how far from home we were… 18,983 km’s to be precise! We left the Eiffel Tower and headed back to Montmarte for the Moulin Rouge – this show is very touristy I know but incredible! There were a number of excellent acts (a ventriloquist, a shadow puppeteer, an acrobatic duo) that performed as well as the dancing girls that wore essentially two diamantes and a feather – sometimes not even the diamantes….. anyway the costumes, colours and dancing was amazing – I was however a little disappointed that they didn’t do a French can can in the way that I grew up thinking a can can was done… you know arm in arm in a long line – legs kicking high…. Anyway still brilliant and we were exhausted by the time we got back to the hotel!

Our final day came around and it was time to head home – not before heading to another set of markets though in St Quen, one of the outer suburbs of Paris…. When we got out of the tube I wondered where we were going because we had left gorgeous (what I guess is really touristy) Paris behind and I felt like we had wandered into South Auckland…. We got to the market which had about two and half thousand stalls with everything from food to clothes to French antiquities to garage sale junk! This place could suck up the hours! Some of the antiques were incredible and there were a number of items that I would have loved to bring home if only I had a castle in NZ that was big or opulent enough to be able to hold that much ornate gold trim! We left there and headed back to Gare de Nord caught the Eurostar home exhausted but so so stoked that we had FINALLY got to Paris!