It's safe to say that Paris has not been super kind to us so far, we had about three days of straight rain! We did our best to stay indoors and visited Notre Dame, although neither of us are religious we both thought it was a beautiful church - the stained glass windows and high ceilings were amazing. There was a service going on while we were there so we had to be quiet (although most people seemed to be rude enough not to care), which kind of added to the vibe!
As you can tell from the picture below the place was absolutely packed!! Paris has taught us a thing or too about crowded tourist attractions and this wasn't even the half of it!
We also headed to the Montparnasse Tower, kind of like our Eureka tower, it looks out over the whole of Paris, although as you can imagine most people were focused on getting photos of the Eiffel Tower!
As you can tell by all these photos it was definitely not a nice day! Rained for most of the day and we got absolutely soaked! I will definitely be throwing out my shoes once the cold part of this trip is over cos they got pretty messed up!
The next day it was raining - surprise! We were doing a day trip to the Palace of Versailles, which we thought would be mostly indoors but we did not take into account the line - OMG I have never seen a line for anything so long in my life! We ended up standing in line in the rain for over an hour, which was not so much fun. By the time we got inside we were soaked (again... my poor boots) and the place was so packed with people that you could barely move, let alone stop and look at anything, as you just got pushed along with the crowd! Definitely the most annoying part of the day (especially as this is my least favourite thing!)
The Palace itself (or what I saw of it over other short peoples heads) was beautiful and HUGE - it even has an opera house somewhere inside! The Gardens were also beautiful but since were were wet and freezing we didn't spend a lot of time outside (I think I now have a fear of the rain).
This picture is taken in the palace courtyards (with the few other brave people that dared to go outside to escape the inside crowds!), it actually doesn't even look real.
Finally the weather got better!!!!!!!!! We went for a walk to check out the Love Lock bridge, it is absolutely insane how many padlocks are on that bridge, apparently they have to chop a bunch off every so often so the bridge doesn't get weighed down!
As you can see we invested in a tiny padlock of our own and locked it to the bridge!
Although we have been eating a fair bit of home cooked (and not too spectacular meals) so as not to completely blow our budget we treated ourselves to one amazing Parisian meal! After walking around for a very long time (and, yes, I was rather hangry...) we found a cute little restaurant, which ended up being completely packed! Everything was in French so we kind of had to do our best to decipher some French words and otherwise take a stab at what we were ordering. Luckily the waiter spoke English, although he seemed to understand/laugh at my terrible attempts at French!
The food was amazing!!! Especially dessert!! Oh and the wine, yummm!!
We also trekked north to Montmatre - the seedy/sex shop area of Paris! Coincidentally this is where the Moulin Rouge is located!
We were mainly there to visit another church, Sacre Coeur, which again had gorgeous stained glass windows! The place was packed, even more packed then Notre Dame! We decided to climb the 300 winding, steep steps (this staircase could make anyone claustrophobic, I don't know how the old priests would have done it) and I was thrilled to find much less crazy tourists up there! We got to see a beautiful view of Paris (Eiffel Tower once again haha) and were must less bothered by the crowds!
The photo below is of one of the bell towers at Sacre Coeur with the Eiffel Tower in the background, this is about as artistic as I get!
As you can tell from the photo below (sorry about the quality), I am not kidding about the crowds! They seriously frighten me and will push you out of the way to the 'the photo!'
We even got up bright and early to go visit the Louvre! I am not a museum person at all (way too impatient) but I actually quite liked it, having said that we walked about for about three hours before realising there was no way we could see the whole place! We actually decided to get there on opening to avoid the long wait, oh how wrong we were, at 8:45 there was an 1.5hr queue, although in their defense we only actually waited 25 mins (thank god!)
Our time in line did give me the opportunity to take a non-people-spoiled photo before we went in!
Of course we got to see the famous Mona Lisa (not that impressive in real life but the crowd around that paining was ridiculous!) as well as a lot of naked men paintings and statues and the armless Venus statue (one of the only things I actually recognised). Michael also got to see a few Sphinx haha!
We spent the rest of the day strolling up the Champs Elysees (well we were kinda stumbling along cos our feet are so sore from all the walking!) and checking out the Arc De Triomphe - which was almost the best part of the day because we got to watch the crazy, no-rules traffic flying around the no-laned roundabout!
Tonight we plan on heading to the Eiffel Tower while it's all lit up and maybe grabbing dessert (because who could say not to that on their last night in Paris!)
Sorry for the long post, there was a lot happening in Paris and we have super fast WIFI that I am feeling the need to make use of!
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