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Today is our day to explore Paris! We met Brian for breakfast and he held to his plan from the previous evening to stay in the hotel this morning in order to rest his ankle and let us run around wherever we want to this morning without him slowing us down. Our only plan for the morning is to walk over and see the Notre Dame, so after breakfast we head out into the city. The weather is a bit ominous, but we only got sprinkled on briefly.
It didn't take too long for us to walk over to the Notre Dame, to find that it's under construction. It seemed like many sites were being worked on, possibly for the French Independence Day (Bastille Day) which is later this month, but more likely to be in perfect shape for millennium celebrations later this year. David was unimpressed with the cathedral's interior: it was *very* dark, plus very crowded! They were doing some restoration in the interior, which was interesting to watch. Neither Paige nor David had thought about what "Notre Dame" meant, but it soon became clear when we saw that all the displays (what are the cubby-holes around the outside of the cathedral called?) were for appearances of the Virgin Mary. When we figured this out we quickly found the alter(?) to "Our Lady of Guadalupe", which is famous amongst the Catholics here in New Mexico.
When we wandered back outside David made Paige take this picture of him with this cool status of Charlemagne.
Then we wandered around to the back side of the cathedral to see the famous flying buttresses.
And David took a picture of Paige in the gardens.
Now we really weren't sure what to do with ourselves. Paige had read about a "street of flowers" nearby, but wasn't too sure where it was, so we went wandering. We saw some cool fountains (hmmm, I thought I took a picture, must be on the 400ASA roll...) and eventually discovered the street of flowers, which turned out to have more indoor plants than flowers, and was mostly deserted in the light drizzle that was falling.
Now we were thinking of going to a museum, which was back in the direction of the hotel, but we didn't have much time before we should pick Brian up, so we headed back to the hotel and gathered Brian a bit earlier than the agreed-upon time. Brian wanted to show us the hotel he stayed in during his previous trip to Paris, and we planned to eat Gyros in the "little Greece" section of town he said was around that area, which is exactly what we did.
A bit to Brian's surprise, his hotel had been upgraded a bit since he'd stayed there, and was nicer and less expensive than the place we stayed, oh well!
The Greek food around that area was amazing. We stopped in the first place we saw, which might have been a bit of a mistake as there were nicer-looking places around, but the Gyros were good and not too expensive.
After lunch we headed to the Metro and bought all-day metro passes, which was a big mistake because we only rode the Metro once the rest of the day! We didn't realize how much time the Eiffel tower was going to take... it basically sucked up the rest of our day. We took the Metro to the station closest to the tower then walked over to see the huge lines, and stood in line for the next hour. What was interesting was to see the street vendors, who must have been illegal because occasionally guys in police uniforms on roller-blades would swoop down through the crowd, and these vendors would wrap their stuff up and hide it and act like tourists. Paige and David had actually seen this while standing in line to enter the Notre Dame: a woman opened up a cloth that had souvenir trinkets in the inside, then when we weren't interested she did something with them because the next moment they were gone and she looked like just another tourist looking for members of her tour group. Anyway, here Paige is standing next to one of the bases that the tower stands on. Brian wanted her to climb up onto it, but as she went to do so a guard started approaching her (you can see him to the right of Paige by the yellow box), so she figured this was the best pose for the picture.
Here we are headed up in the elevator. You can see the top of the tower through the lower girders and the bird poop on the Plexiglas ceiling of the elevator car.
We didn't stop at the second level, we headed straight for the top, and here's the view of Paris.
And Paige and David at the top of the Eiffel Tower!
We rode the elevator back down to the 2nd level and looked around a bit. This is the view down from the center of the second level of the tower.
David decided he was going to walk down the stairs from the second level to the first level, and he snapped this picture of the stairs on his way down. Paige joined him to walk down from the first level to the ground level, but Brian rode the elevator down. We regrouped at the bottom and headed to get a few more pictures.
It has been raining a bit while we were on the second and first levels of the Eiffel Tower, but it stayed fairly dry for the rest of the day. We walked across the Seine and up by some fountains and Brian took an APS picture of us standing in front of the fountains with the tower in the background. It has a big display of the days remaining until the year 2000. We were wondering what "J" stood for thinking "Could it be 'Days'"? we couldn't think of the French word for "day" until Paige said "Soup d'Jeur is soup of the day", so we assume that the "J" is for Jeur.
At this point we were thinking it was time to head back to the hotel and change into clothing for dinner. David had wanted to take one of the boat rides on the Seine, and there seemed to be a boat-stand just below us, so we headed down there to investigate. We ended up taking a boat back to the hotel, which is why we only used one ride each on our all-day Metro pass. The boat ride was pretty boring: we took a sort of boat taxi, we should have taken a real boat tour, or one of the dinner cruises which looked interesting, but they looked very expensive: we saw one the evening before and everyone was very dressed up, the tables all had nice linen table cloths.
We got back to the hotel and changed into slightly dressy clothing and walked down to a cafe (bar?) on the corner and had wine and hours d'ouvres for dinner. We noticed several people drinking an "electric green" drink, so Paige ordered one for David, which he enjoyed: very minty! (Was it called a "Creme d'Menthe"?)
After that David was done for the evening, but Paige and Brian went back out to another bar where they talked with an American model they bumped into.
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