Day 5 (Part 2) - Exploring Paris

Oh, and this is a niftly little street sign nearby

Here you can see the escalator running along the outside of the building

We stopped for lunch at a small sandwich stand nearby and had a French hot dog.  Basically, it's a baguette, with two hot dogs and cheese.  So much better than the American version.

After lunch, we made our way back to the hotel.  Turns out, or at least I'm assuming so, that the higher the metro line number, the newer it is.  For instance, the nice new line we took was 14, this one was 7 and decidedly less nice.  I make a mental note to use higher numbers when possible.

We check in to the hotel and everything seems great, but the internet is not free!  It's one of those 'hotspots' you sometimes see in the states where you need a T-mobile subscription to use it or something like that.  In this case, it was Orange France.  Nice.

Here's the view from our hotel.

After a much needed nap, we decided to go see the Eiffel Tower.  We waited in line for about an hour, and during that time they closed the top level (there are 3).  We were a little disappointed, but later learned that if we wanted to, we could purchase tickets on the second level to go up (I think it was just about too many people up there at the time).  During our wait in line, we saw Carrie's brother's Asian twin.  It was truly bizarre.  I wanted to take a picture but he was really close to us and I didn't see how I could do it subtly.

So we took the elevator to the second floor and loved it.

Here's a shot as we approached from the south.

On our way up

And now shots from the tower.

If I zoom in on this view, you can see the Sacre Coeur in the Montmartre area.

More views.  This towards the Palais de Chaillot, with downtown in the background.

Up towards the top level

We got dizzy just looking up, so we decided not to go ahead and make the final trek.  At least we saved about 4 euros each.

Looking over the Seine

Looking in the direction of the Champ de Mars and the building in the background is the Ecole militaire

We got there later in the evening, and thought it would be cool to wait around until after sunset to see the lights of Paris.

To pass the time, we looked in the little shops and had some coffee and a chocolate waffle.  Yummy.

I took some more pictures... you can see the Arc de Triomphe in the center of this shot

Here's the Hotel des Invalides.  Note the shadow created by the tower.

Around 9:15 pm, though, we gave up on the sunset as it was clearly not going to be happening anytime soon.  That, and our days were, at this point, getting rather long.  So we made our way home.

This is the tower from the Northwest

Getting back, however, was not so easy.  First of all, I lost my 3-day metro pass, so I had to buy a regular ticket.  Then, there was contrustion on the line I tried to use, so we had to do several changes on our way back.  All told, it probably took us about an hour before we got back to our hotel.

After thinking a bit about what to do tomorrow, we passed out and set the alarm with only enough time to make our continental breakfast.