The Eiffel Tower and The Louvre

Friday February 22, 2008

After being herded like cattle onto the airplane, there aren’t assigned seats with Ryan Air, I slept for a while. When we got off of the plane we had to stand in line to buy tickets for the shuttle bus to Paris because we flew into the Beauvais airport which is a couple of hours outside of Paris. After freezing in line, I could see my breath in the air for the first time in weeks, we finally got our tickets and were bused to Paris. We arrived in Paris around 9:30-10am and were on a mission to find a bathroom. That took us a while but afterwards we were much better off and we used the Metro to head to our hostel. We found our hostel without a problem and it was amazing, despite the fact that we didn’t have electricity in our “studio.” We left the keys with the guy at the front desk who spoke English, thank God, so we could get our electricity fixed before we came home for the night. We left the hostel and went to our first French café. The owner was amazing and we called him Jean “le shit” Pierre because it was all we knew of French minus hello, goodbye, and thank you. With food in our stomachs we headed to the Eiffel Tower. We saw the tower and just followed in the general direction and it took almost an hour to walk to the tower. We went up the tower when we got there and it was an amazing view. I was surprised that the place was packed, but apparently it is a national monument. I think that I heard 8 different languages just standing in line and waiting. We took a lot of pictures and the view from the top of the tower was incredible and of the entire city. It was a little creepy being so high up, but it was almost a euphoric feeling. We found a couple from Wisconsin who took our picture on the top of the tower; it really is a small world. Afterwards we walked to a café, which took us forever to decide upon mostly because we were all a little moody and tired at this point. We ate our Panini’s and the world was better so we started our walk to the Louvre. If you have ever seen the Da Vinci Code it looked exactly how it is in the movie. We went down the glass tri-angle looking thing and headed into one wing of the museum. The Louvre is free on Fridays for students so we took full advantage of that. We saw a lot of famous statues and paintings, one being The Mona Lisa…I don’t know if you’ve heard of that one or not? After the Louvre we went back to the tower to take pictures at night. Interesting fact: not only is the tower glowing at night, but it sparkles as well. For ten minutes every hour the tower twinkles like a Christmas tree, its amazing and very fairy tale-esk. After the twinkling ceased we decided to be complete tourists and got crepes close to the tower, mine was strawberry and banana. The crepe man thought that I wanted “ham and bananas” instead of “jam and bananas” so that was almost a disaster, but everything worked out well. We hopped onto the Metro to our hostel to find out that we still didn’t have electricity. They ended up finding another hotel for us and we packed all of our things to move. We found the hotel up the street a while and arrived at The Prélude Hotel, to find that the hostel had paid the difference (30 v. 110) and included breakfast. The switch around ended up being completely in our favor and for some reason everything worked out really well. Luckily the guy in the hotel spoke English as well. It was different being in Paris because I am so used to hearing Spanish and English. Everytime someone said anything to me in French, I immediately switched to my “Spanish brain” and responded in Spanish instead of in English. For the record, they don’t understand Spanish at all, but they do understand English so that was a comfort. Apparently charades is an international game as well because we frequently found ourselves playing. At the end of the night we brought our things upstairs and then headed to a store for some snacks. After returning home we headed to bed after a really long day.