Of course it was beautiful and sunny when we arrived Saturday morning, and I decided to leave my jacket at the hostel and go around for the day in only a sweatshirt. We tried to hit most of the highlights for Gab and Angie who had never been to Paris before, and along the way we discovered just how insane Paris' transit system is! Metro lines crossed each other everywhere but the stations never seemed to overlap. So trying to get to the Eiffel Tower we decided to walk from a station that didn't look too far on the map... So we had a nice stroll through an expensive looking district of Paris (or maybe it's all expensive), all the while trying to see the tower over the tops of buildings. For such a monstrous tower it hides itself pretty well! When we got to the tower I was extremely confused because I couldn't find the place I'd stood to take a picture only a few years ago! I would think a large, flat space of dirt would be easy to find...
We decided to try and find a metro stop closer to the tower so we could head back towards the Louvre, and we ended up at something called the RER. Not quite a metro or train, because Paris has separate lines for those, the RER was some other kind of underground rail transport that somehow needed to be called something different. And it drives on the left hand side, as we discovered while waiting on a platform expecting it to go the other way.
Just before going in to the Louvre, we stopped at Angelina's, a place my mom recommended we go for hot chocolate. It was a popular place! We waited in line on the sidewalk for ten minutes before going in, but it was worth it. Our waitress wasn't particularly friendly, but the chocolate was amazing! (And so were our desserts!)
At the Louvre we split up to go see the exhibits we were most interested in. I went through the section of works from Iran and Syria (Mesopotamian, Akkadian, Babylonian sculptures and things) which was cool for me after having touched on cuneiform and akkadian writing in a linguistics class at UVic. I also really liked this lion, because it's made from separate brick-shaped sections and it's formed so the lion is 3D coming out of the background. Hard to explain, but I thought it was really cool.
I'll stop there on my explanaition of what I saw at the Louvre because I don't want to bore you all if you're not interested in art. All in all I loved it and am looking forward to going back sometime later to see the other sections.
Just before returning to the hostel to get our room keys (and my jacket, as it was starting to get cold!) we hopped over to Notre Dame. It was a bit of an easier trip than getting to the Eiffel Tower. There was a service going on, so it felt really awkward being a tourist in there. I was surprised they let people in to look around during a service. And there was a souvenir shop inside! It was kind of disappointing.
By the evening it had started to rain, and we set out to Montmartre to see the Moulin Rouge and Sacre Coeur by night. We found a little cafe to go for dinner and realized it was 10:30! So we had a super later dinner, but it was delicious. Then it began to rain even harder as we puzzled our way through the metro to get back to our hostel, where we all slept like logs despite the creaky, shaky bunkbeds.
Since this is a pretty long post I'll split it in two and continue on to the real hurricane part of the trip.
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