Friday, February 11, 2011

Paris.

At the end of December, I went to Paris with my host family. We left early in the morning and it took about 3 hours to get to the city. We stopped briefly at our hotel, left the car there, and took the métro. The first thing I saw when I got back above ground was l'Arc de Triomphe, on the Champs-Élysées.




That's right! Napolean's army was in Arlon, Belgium...the city where I go to school.


We continued along the Champs-Élysées...



On the right of the picture above, you can see a blue awning...that is a Belgian café, sitting right in the middle of Paris. "Léon de Bruxelles, La Brasserie Belge."

Anyway, we took the métro to Montmartre...and when they say "mont," they mean it. Here we are climbing the stairs toward Sacré Cœur.


It was a long climb, but eventually we got to the top, and here is Sacré Coeur. It was really crowded, so we didn't go inside, but here it is.


...and here is the view of Paris from in front of Sacré Cœur. Worth the climb, right?

That first evening was a Wednesday, which meant that the Louvre was open later than it is the rest of the week. So we went that evening. Unfortunately, my camera doesn't take great pictures at night, but here is the Louvre.

This is the Winged Victory of Samothrace, also known as the Nike of Samothrace. It's my favorite sculpture, one that I studied in Sculpture class back in the US, so I was really excited to actually see it.

I'm sure you all know this little Leonardo Da Vinci painting...

Our dear smiling Mona Lisa sits in a room off the Grand Gallery, an astonishingly long room of Italian paintings.

Among the buildings of the Louvre are several glass pyramids. Here's a picture of one of the museum's buildings taken from below, through one of these pyramids.

That's it for the first day.

The next day, we woke up to a clear sky. It was nice, since we had tickets to climb the Eiffel Tower at 11:30, and it had been cloudy the day before.

Here is the view from my hotel room. We were lucky...it was so clear that morning that we could see Sacré Cœur from the room.

We took the métro to the tower...here is one of the many Parisian métro stations.

And here is my family waiting for the next train to come.

And here is the Eiffel Tower, in the midst of a beautiful blue sky.

This is the view from the first level...


...and this is the view from the veeeerrry top.

Paris...it's a long way from home. New York City, 5849 km. Ottawa, 5662 km.

Though we took the elevator up, we decided to climb down on foot. I'll have to come back sometime and climb up on foot...

Anyway, here's Flo climbing down. As soon as we started to descend, the sky began to fill with clouds. By the time we reached the ground, we could no longer even see the top of the tower.


On a vraiment eu de la chance. Et Paris, c'est une belle ville. J'y irais encore...

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