The City of Lights

Well, another weekend, another trip. I am starting to feel like a true jet-setter now! I went back to Paris this weekend with my friend Crystal. Luckily for me, we did not do all the same things that I did with my family. First of all, we got to the hotel and it was an old little hole in the wall, but the people there were very friendly and the room was clean. We were a little disturbed by the look of the place at first but in a good neighborhood for 120 EUR a night what to you expect. The added bonus is that we each got our own double bed which is quite unusual for the hotel rooms here. I had to sign us up for a triple room because there were no double rooms available. A triple room at the best hotels is one double bed and one twin bed. So this was much more than I expected. In the States you get so used to the comfort of knowing that you will almost always have two double beds in a standard room. Here that is very hard to get. Since the hotel is basically just to sleep, we got over that one pretty quickly. We had gotten the same hop on hop off bus tour passes for the next couple days so we decided to stick with what was in our area for that day. Our first stop was at the Musee d’Orsay. I really liked some of the work here, mostly the Renoir Paintings and the Rodin Sculptures. But there was also a special photography exhibition that was really cool. I think that I pushed Crystal a bit over the edge with the museums between here and Amsterdam so I did miss some of the impressionist work that I would have liked to see there. As it is a renovated train station the architecture of the building was just as cool as the pieces in it. From there we went over to where we got our bus passes and signed up for the Illuminations night tour of Paris and then walked around. We found the highlight of my trip….a Starbucks Coffee! For those of you who have heard me complain about the size of the coffee in Luxembourg, you will know how truly exciting this was for me. I had to pay 5 Euros for a Caramel Macchiato but I had a coffee that I could carry around with me! I also had to take a picture of myself in front of the Starbucks to send back…I know I am such a dork, but I was really excited about it. After my exciting trip to Starbucks we had a glass of wine at a little café that backed on one of the really old churches in the area, it was a really cool atmosphere to sit outside and enjoy, and then we had a long dinner at another little café, and the food was fabulous. We started with escargot, which I probably just like for the garlic butter, but it was really yummy. Then we each had the duck and goat cheese salad, also really nice, plus coffee and crème brulee. It was a long dinner, but very worth it, probably one of the best meals I have had so far. Then it was time for the night tour. I took the bulk of my pictures here, Paris is really beautiful at night, especially the Eiffel Tower all lit up, we really enjoyed this tour more than just about everything. We decided also to make this trip more of a vacation than we had the other ones, so we slept in, at least it was sleeping in for me, Crystal would have slept until noon, I woke up at about 9:30, Sorry Crystal. By the time we got ready and ventured out, we had a late breakfast at another little café because as you may know or guess, there are about a million of these in Paris. After that we found our bus tour in front of the Louvre and went over to the Champs Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe. We really did not spend too much time here as the lines were really long and we had already planned to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. When we got there the line was really long and it was really hot out pretty much the whole weekend. If you ever decide to go there, you can only make reservations on tickets for group tours and be prepared to spend about 3 hours. The view was great; you could see the whole city from there. Unfortunately when we came down we realized that our tour bus had been shut down for the night due to the Musicfest that was going to happen that night. This posed a problem as we needed find the Metro and figure out our own way home. Obviously, it happened but it was a little bit of a project. Another great dinner at yet another little café helped to curb the annoyance that we felt. We stayed there for quite some time and heard some of the bands playing while we were walking home. Sunday, we slept in again and then grabbed a quick pastry and headed to the Rodin Museum. This is Crystal’s favorite sculpture and really all she wanted to see was The Thinker which was in the garden there. To our pleasant surprise you are able to go into the gardens for free, so we just took a garden pass and walked around there. I took some photos there and the we left and went to the Louvre. We did the short tour there, which touched on the three most popular pieces, the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. We were going to try and do another tour, but the GPS on the audio/visual tour we got was a little too much for either of us to figure out probably due to the heat, but we decided to forgo a second tour and just wait a the train station. We made it back to Luxembourg at about 9:15pm. Although we were really tired, we decided to go out anyway. It was the Duke’s Birthday weekend, which is like our 4th of July, but much bigger. There were fireworks, bands, food and drink vendors all over the streets. It was an amazingly large party and a lot of fun. Other than losing Crystal and needing to find her again it was a great time. We got home about 1:30 in the morning and we could have stayed out much later. Several of my friends were out until the sun came up, but since Crystal needed to be at the airport by 8 in the morning we opted for a couple hours sleep instead. Since I had Monday off here, I could rest then. Overall, it was another great weekend. Paris is really one of my favorite places so far and the Duke’s birthday celebration was something that could not be missed!