I woke up at 8:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. Too excited! Breakfast was awesome for being free: we got baguettes, coffee, orange juice, and croissants with a chocolate cream filling:
Minor inconvenience, but nothing worth really complaining about: we had to switch rooms because another group wanted to occupy the same floor of the hostel. We had to move up 6 floors, but the "hike" was worth it. The new room is a lot better and cleaner!
After breakfast and our little move, we headed out to the Louvre. The homeruns for me were the Mona Lisa (SO HARD TO GET A DECENT SHOT), biblical paintings from the Italian Renaissance, and the statues. Again, I took a lot of pictures*. We couldn't find the Venus De Milo (I wanted to see it because of that Simpsons episode where Homer eats the gummy one), but overall, this museum was awesome. I'm really happy I got to go to both the British Museum and the Louvre. The amount of history contained in these places is almost overwhelming - we spent about three hours in each museums, and didn't see everything. I think if we tried to, our heads would have exploded.
Next on the itinerary was the Eiffel Tower. We walked up to the second level (a heck of a lot of stairs), and then took the elevator up to the top. The view was amazing, and here's a shot from one of the faces of the tower:
As always, the walk back down went a lot faster. We were starving by this point, so we stopped by a restaurant that was serving steak and fries (steak frite), which is apparently pretty popular here. Again, the fries were served with mayo, so I asked for ketchup. I figured they already knew I wasn't French, and I didn't feel like having a heart attack in Europe.
We stopped by the hostel afterward because I filled up my camera card (1 gig) and needed to pick up a fresh one. Plus, we needed a short breather from all that walking. We took a little rest, then headed out again to see some smaller sights and find a place for dinner. A lot of the places were outside of our budget, but we found a small place that was serving three-course meals for 20 euros! Actually, this is a lot of money (about $30 US), but Paris is pretty expensive. A bonus was that they served escargot, which we wanted to try when we were in Paris. The place was called L'uberge du Champ de Mars (I have no idea how to say this properly), and I got escargot, roasted duck, salad, and pear sorbet. It wasn't the gourmet French food that you see in movies like Ratatouille, but the portions were big and it was delicious. Anyway, David and I had a pretty good talk here. In some ways, we're really similar.
After dinner, we walked back toward the Eiffel Tower to see it at night. I knew that they lit up the structure at night from our tour of it earlier in the day, but I didn't know that there was a spinning beacon of light at the top. It's pretty breathtaking. Here's a shot of it and the Seine River at night:
It was pretty late at this point, so we metroed back to the Hostel.
Surprise! Aletheia, Rebs, and Jen moved back to our hostel because a room opened up and the other hostel was shady. We caught up, and shared our more interesting Europe stories thus far. I guess the discussion got pretty loud because one of our neighbors came and knocked on our door. We opened it to apologize, and it was an older dude wearing a tee and whitey tighties. I was sitting on the floor, so it was at eye-level for me. I swear, I had to close my eyes and picture the Eiffel Tower again to wash that image out afterward.
That pretty much killed the mood, so David and I headed back to our room, showered, and are pretty much ready to sleep.
Thanks to Jen's advice, our plan tomorrow is to check out the Notre Dame, Arch de Triomph, and Champs Elysee (I've been saying this during our whole time in Paris because it's fun to say). SHOMPZAYLEEZAY. We head out to Stuttgart at 10 PM tomorrow on an overnighter bus which will arrive the next day at 7 AM. I kinda wish we were flying, but we couldn't find a cheap flight from Paris to Stuttgart. This is a pretty good option, though. Hopefully the seats are comfortable.
Night!
*My Paris album is here.
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