I woke up at 8 am as planned. Now it's 8 45 am, and I'm waiting until 9 30 for the rest of my party to be ready. Of course the first thing I think of is journal writing.
Day 2 began with a lot less sleep than I expected, but enough to tide me over and not make me regret coming to Paris entirely (as if the previous day hadn't done that already).
We ate breakfast downstairs at the hotel, and while we felt that certain things were uniquely French, we were decidedly surprised when 1) the breakfast was not included as told earlier on and 2) priced at €14.50. We were granted the breakfast as free as a courtesy and would be charged for any susequent breakfast (which never happened). I talked to the front desk, and they planned to air out the room until night and then switch me if i found the room unsatifactory (basically the guy on dity at night was a complete dick). Then we took the subway to the Eiffel tower. The subway ride wasnt bad, and then we looked at it a fair bit and took some photos. It wasn't as tall as the CN tower, and we didn't have a tour guide woth us so I honestly didn't know what was special about it, but it did look nice.
We then went to L'Arc de Triomphe, which was quite nice. However, the trip then took a turn for the much-worse when we decided to search the area for lunch. My family and I are (thankfully) decidedly frugal when it comes to eating out, and I don't believe that 20+ euros is a reasonable price for a meal. Unfortunately, many restaurants on the Champs Elysees are overpriced (per us anyway) and we ended up walking 25 minutes just to find a decent place at which to eat lunch. We ended up at an Italian place, eating some more pizza as we had done the day before for dinner. The frenchest thing i did that meal was to order a cappucino.
Following the lunch, we wandered toward a souvenir shop and the war musem, and that somehow killed three jours. My waiting for a public bathroom in France was a 40-minute affair (apparently they auto-clean) but it was totally worth it since i then found out the "two storey" climb up the eiffel tower was 700 steps. I was not at all prepared for physical activity that day, though I do at times fancy myself a bit of an athlete.
The top of the eiffel tower was wonderful. But it was crowded, and it was cold. I realized once again why Paris has such a negative attitude toward tourists ( from what I've. Seen anyway ). The wait for the elevator down was also unpleasant. It took an hour and 20 minutes total to descend the eiffel tower, and 40 minutes of that hour and 20 were spent outside in the cold, damp May Paris weather, which was quite unappealing. Then we had to take the subway home, which I simply did not want to do at the time, but tolerated fairly well. By then i started to realize that I couldn't honestly say I enjoy the "let's walk 8 miles a day and see everything" vacation. Anyway, I came home tired and went to bed. The room didn't smell. Day 2 was better than day 1.
No comments:
Post a Comment