Tour Paris France, the Louvre, Notre Dame and Arc de Triomphe

Oct 14, 2004

We woke up at 6am to shower dress and enjoy a French style continental breakfast, with fresh croissants! I adore fresh croissants!
Then after some quick shopping at a local grocery store for baguettes and cold cut meat, we packed ourselves bag lunches and headed out to see all the historic Paris sites we’d been dreaming of.

Notre Dame was incredible, but even though it was the off season there were a LOT of tourists milling around. I love gothic architecture, and the cathedral was absolutely magnificent. It was filled with large paintings of saints or other religious themes, which unfortunately they didn’t allow pictures of. There was some repair work going on at one side of the exterior, but for a seven hundred year old cathedral it was amazingly well preserved. The gargoyles and saint statues were awesome, but the stained glass windows were the best. We got lots of pictures of those. I bought myself a little prayer card in French for a souvenir.

From Notre Dame we crossed the river Seine to visit the pub, and saw a beautiful fountain depicting the Angel Michaels battle with Satan. From there we headed up to see the Arc de Triomphe, and artist’s square where we were bombarded by women claiming that they were refugee’s and needed money. They all had postcards with the same desperate sounding message printed on them, in English. It was obvious that they were preying on the tourists’ sympathy.

The Louvre was next on our list and we wandered its floors for over four hours before deciding that we would never see it all in time. I was exhausted and told the other three to go on without me. I found myself a little coffee shop on a balcony overlooking the main entrance and settled down to people watching. Within minutes I was joined by a pair of Chinese business men who were in Paris on business, but found themselves with a free afternoon before they needed to fly back home. We engaged in a lively conversation which ended in a firm command for our group to come out to China and visit their homes. They assured me that China was “even more beautiful” than Paris because unique style of their historic architecture.

With weary legs and soaring spirits we didn’t return to our hotel until very late that night. Exhausted, and a bit jet lagged to boot, it was all we could do to eat a light dinner and fall into our beds.


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