Day Five: Hello France

So we got in late to Paris, people associated with international flights don't seem to be too keen on schedules or keeping to them. Regardless, we got to Paris about midnight two nights ago and had our first "crisis." We got to the metro station (similar to London's underground, Paris' is a subway called the Metro), and the machines were in French to sell us tickets. No problem, we hit a little icon and bam, we've got English. So we go to buy some tickets, and they don't take Euros... like.. the cash. They say they'll accept the coins (euros come in one and two euro coins as well), but we didn't have any of those. No big deal, right? I mean, we've got credit cards. We try those, but the reader won't read them. Now Katie starts to get a little exasperated. She was right, the language barrier would prove to be difficult. We aimlessly walked around for about thirty minutes, trying to figure out what to do, not being able to read any signs, and finally we asked a guy if he could speak english. He spoke very little, but pointed us to an information desk about a half mile down the terminal where a little spoke enough english to help us. Then we got on the metro, found out our directions we received were bad, and it took another hour to get to the right hotel.

We slept in pretty late, seeing as we had about 10 hours of combined sleep the first four nights combined, and ventured out into Paris. Before we went out though, we decided to take the hotel manager's recommendation for lunch, and here's what we got.

that was katie's salad.. she loved it

this was my half-chicken, it was the most delicious thing i've eaten outside of America, and rivals most things I've eaten at home...

So our first meal in France was awesome, seriously we talked about it the rest of the day. After eating, we ran into an American couple (older people) at the restaurant. They were from Florida and visiting Paris before they went to see their son, who was studying in Rome. Their son's roomate was Tony Blair's daughter. First of all, co-ed roomates are funny to me, but to have the former prime-minister of England's daughter as your roommate would be CRAZY.

After talking with them, we went to the Louvre. This is the biggest museum on the planet. OK, so I don't know that for sure, I'm just saying. It was about five football fields long by five football fields wide. There is so much famous stuff there I cannot begin to explain it, so I will show you pictures.

This is in front of I.M. Pei's glass Pyramid, which is actually the entrance to the Louvre

oh and this little gal here is the mona lisa, found her hanging out with no one even remotely trying to see her!

ok so I lied, there were two hundred people trying to see her, but Katie got close! (see below)

Katie just hanging out with Mona...

this is me next to a giant cup

I'd upload more pictures of the cool stuff (I think Katie and I took about 200 combined at the Louvre), but it takes about a minute to upload each picture, and I have little patience. So I'll continue to talk about what we did the rest of the day.

After the Louvre, we went back to our hotel and sat down for about fourty five minutes.. Walking around the Louvre was tiring, so the break was great. Then we left the hotel, and decided to chance going to the Eiffel Tower. We had heard it's cool to see the lights turn on, and it was about dusk, so we hopped a Metro and headed across the Seine. We got there, and walked through about the half mile park below the tower (or Tour Eiffel, as the French call it), and as we were approaching, the lights turned on.. It was just after sunset, and was pretty sweet.. There were people making out in the grass all around us, and Katie took pictures of every one of them. Then we got to the base of the Tower, and quickly decided we had to go up as high as we could. There are four pillars at the bottom, and we smartly (sarcasm) chose the one without an elevator. We said screw it, and walked sixty flights of stairs to the second landing. That was a hike, and Katie was a trooper. Below are some pics from the night.

This is Katie just leaning on the Tour Eiffel, no big deal

and that's us, re-enacting the birthday card that Katie's roomates gave her, except this one isn't photo-shopped

Like I said, I could upload photos all day, but it takes a while, so I'm going to stop now. Day one in Paris was awesome, maybe our best day in Europe so far.