Spring Break 2009: Paris France

After a long night of bus rides, plane rides, another bus ride, and a few metro stops we arrived at our Hostel in Paris, around 10 am. We all showered and headed out. First stop, the Eifel Tower of course! First we grabbed some sandwiches so we could have a little picnic on the lawn in front of the Eiffel tower. We enjoyed our lunch and took our touristy pictures, then we headed under the Eiffel tower, at this point we decided to walk up the stairs to the second level of the tower [because the lines for the lifts, aka elevators, was really long. So up some 200 stairs to the first level, we stopped here to a. catch our breath [haha] and b. to take some pictures of the city [but they were only going to get better. So up some 200 more stairs to the second level we went. The second level provided an even more spectacular view of the city of Paris. There were diagrams of the city and certain building and monuments were pointed out. There were also some fun facts about the tower [how often its repainted, different movies that have taken place around the tower, the number of bolts that are in the tower [2,500,000 if you are wondering J ] then we stood in line for about a half an hour for our ride to the very top of the tower. It was VERY windy up there but it was so worth it!

It was spectacular! We then decided to head over to the Louvre because on Friday’s it’s free for students or people under 25 [yeah that’s me!]

We arrived and not everyone had an ID with their birthday on it so instead of just 2 of us going we decided to just wait and go later.
Day 2. The weather was not cooperating with us, so we decided to get on a train and head to the Palace of Versailles, once a home to King Louis 14. We toured the grounds and the Palace for most of the day. It was kind of rainy all day so the tour of the Gardens wasn’t very fun but the gardens were beautiful, full of fountains and sculpted bushes.
The gate infront of the palace.

Hall of Mirrors

Gardens behind the Palace

There was an area with all of these cute little buildings.

Palace in the back-ground


Once we made it back to the entrance, we ate, jumped on the train and headed back into Paris.

Since the next day was our last day and we had many things left to see we decided to view some of them by night [the outside ones]. We rode the metro to go and see the Moulin Rouge [very cool]. It is still a working attraction and it’s pretty expensive to go for dinner and a show so standing outside and taking pictures was pretty cool. Then we jumped back on the metro, went to the Arch de Triumph and walked towards the Eiffel Tower to see the light display. Every hour the Tower ‘sparkles’ for about 5 min, it’s amazing. So we took pictures with the tower by night.

Day 3. Last day in Paris and we still had a few more thing to do. We started with the Louvre since we didn’t’ know how long it was going to take us to see the paintings and things we wanted to see. We wandered around looking at paintings for about an hour and a half. I saw a few paintings that I studied in my art class, of course including the Mona Lisa [which is a lot smaller than you’d think], but it was awesome to know about these paintings and to see them in person.



Winged Victory. Mona Lisa
Raft of Medusa. [one of the paintings we studied in class and saw in the Louvre]

After the Louvre we went to see a couple churches, Notre Dame and St. Chapelle. They were extraordinary. St. Chapelle was pretty small but the high ceilings and architecture was still amazing. And Notre Dame is so amazing too. You stand on the outsides of these churches and they don’t look as big or as spectacular as they really are on the inside.
St. Chapelle

Notre Dame



After this we went and grabbed our bags so we could head to the airport. Our plan was to just sleep in the airport since we had to leave so early the next morning for Dublin but little did we know the airport closed so instead of sleeping the street [which no one wanted to do] we got directions to a cheap hotel that was actually really nice so it was great that we ended up sleeping in an actual bed!