It's so hard to believe that our trip was over a month ago! It feels like ages ago that we were away - coming back and working immediately is a harsh reality for sure.
Paris was our third destination on our trip. After our time in London, we took a gorgeous
train ride and arrived in Paris at night. Overall, Paris was definitely the most difficult city to get along in. There's not as much English speaking going on there, and also the food was the most expensive. We used this opportunity to walk a lot, learn a little bit of French (I had a few basic phrases down, but it wasn't as helpful as I thought it would be), and cook a lot of our own food.
Of course, you have to do the tourist destinations. The
Eiffel Tower was stunning. We walked up to the second floor (exhausting) and then took the elevator all the way up to the top. The views were too beautiful to even try to describe. It's quite breathtaking. You can see everything! We also spent a good six hours at the
Louvre. There are too many masterpieces to really take in at once. Since we were only there for six days, we couldn't really split it into two days, but I think we made our time count. We saw around 80% of the museum, which is pretty impressive! We even took selfies with
Mona Lisa.
Notre Dame was amazing as well. The inside was so gorgeous, it actually brought tears to my eyes.
Our diet basically consisted of two things:
wine and bread. Both are amazingly cheap compared to the rest of the food. We had a
baguette for lunch and dinner. The bread is unlike anything here in America. It's incredibly fresh, crusty, and soft. It's also a very easy lunch to carry around. At night, we bought a lot of fresh produce and made our own sandwiches at our flat. We had a television there, so we watched a ton of
World Cup games, French news, and music videos.
Paris was certainly the least enchanting of all the cities we visited. Surprisingly, it was pretty dirty and at times a little scary (and this is coming from two people living in Center City Philadelphia!). Overall, we weren't exactly sure where all the talk about romance and beauty was coming from. There are many parts of the city that aren't paved - it's just sand. We still had a wonderful time there and learned a lot, but it wasn't as majestic as we had assumed it would be.
Here are some pictures from Paris!
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| The Eiffel Tower in all her glory! |
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| The view from the second level |
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| Being a true Parisian (baguette & arc de triomphe) |
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| The Louvre |
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| Yummy macarons! |
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| Delicious fresh bread, produce, and wine! |
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| The infamous windmill of the Moulin Rouge |
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| Our espressos |
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| Notre Dame - absolutely stunning inside |
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| There were actually a dozen bridges with locks on them! |
