22 season 3

Not 24, but we did manage to be out and about for 22 hours straight. Paris was quite the endurance trial. We started at 9am and got back around 7am on Sunday. Since I missed the Egyptian museum in Berlin I made our first stop la louvre. On the way there we stopped for some breakfast of pastries and baguettes. Once again it was cold and rainy, but luckily I didn't have to waste more money on another jacket. Since we hit the biggest thing in Paris first we figured we would hit the biggest thing in the louvre first, the Mona Lisa. Whenever I had seen pictures of it I suppose I really missed out on the scale. When I got there I was quite disappointed since this portrait is kind of small. But it is cool that regardless of where you stand she's looking at you. On the way to it we passed many priceless paintings, sculptures etc.. In retrospect I feel really bad that I did not have the time to properly appreciate these works of art. But for anyone who has not been to the Louvre I could not even pass by all of the works in under 3 hours let alone look at them all. That and it's addicting as we found out. When our legs began to ache we said, 'time to go.' But then we passed by something really sweet and then something else... In the end we managed to see all of the main sights listed in the pamphlet. I will put pictures of the best in a separate post. After snapping about 300 pictures of the most interesting things at the louvre my battery started dying on my camera and I did not have a charger. So unfortunately all sights post the Louvre are not properly documented.

After leaving the louvre we headed up the Champs-Elysees which is has the most expensive stores etc... on the way to the arc de Triomphe. We stopped off for a snack and to do some people watching. As anyone has heard the wait staff in Paris is terrible, even worse than Holland or Germany. We had to argue about where we were sitting in order to eat and had to change tables twice since we wanted to be on the street. After dropping €30 apiece it was time to head somewhere else to eat again since I was still starving. We hit the arc de triumph for a few then on the way to Notre Dame I stopped for a snack. Notre Dame was pretty cool, but was closed by the time we got there.
Closed...
After Notre Dame we hopped on the subway to get to the Sacre Coeur which was awesome. It's a cool old church that sits on top of a hill and overlooks the city. You couldn't take pictures inside, but there were two awesome gilded silver statues of saints as well as plenty of stained glass, paintings, mosaics, etc... The only problem was that it was getting on hour 13 and you had to climb the stairs up the hill. Everyone was pretty beat at this point and I'm not going to lie but all I wanted to do was lay in bed for a week. But the view was the best in Paris, even better than from the Eiffel tower.


We hopped back on the train and headed back to the hotel. Vlad wanted to go out, Lorik and I were leaning towards sleeping and maybe seeing some other things on Sunday. We got back to the hotel around 11 and decided that since we hit all the major sights it would be fun to go out... and you're only in Paris so often. So I changed my shirt and shoes and we headed out to La Loco one of the top 5 clubs in Paris. Low and behold when we popped out of the subway for the club what do we find? Moulin Rouge, right next door to our destination. It was of course closed and we couldn't get tickets to Lido so no cabaret in Paris for us, but Loco was sweet nonetheless. Inside I saw some of the craziest dancers ever since it was an electronic club. Although my favorite song was the electronic version of teen spirit...

We left around 5 am grabbed some snacks where Vlad had to wait the longest for his crepes in a definite discrimination case. So we got back to the hotel around 7am for a short nap. After getting up it was off for more terrible service where an empty restaurant wouldn't let Vlad and I have our own tiny tables so we could both watch passersby across from the train station. Although after placing our order to the tune of about €50 I got my own table and the server was much nicer. We ate, then barely caught our train home. It was my first time on an ICE and it was pretty cool. At least until we got into Germany where it slowed down significantly. So this was another max extreme weekend full of sights, sounds, and the Parisian equivalent of red bull ;-)