Bonjour de Paris!

I've always wanted to travel to Paris and last week I was finally able to do so :-)
We thought about taking the high speed train to Paris but then decided to drive. The drive from Belgium to Paris was three hours but we stopped halfway to eat so the time flew by. We saw the high speed trains go past the highway and WOW were they FAST. The train gets to Paris in one and half    hours! When we plan our trip to London we will most likely be taking the speed train.                                   The very first place on my itinerary.... yes I made another itinerary. My schedules may be nerdy but hey we were able to see almost all of the main sights in two days. The first place was the Eiffel Tower! The tower is even more gorgeous than I expected. We wanted to go up to the top but the line was a two hour wait so we figured we'd do that on another visit when it wasn’t FREEZING outside. The cutest part of being there was seeing a stranger propose to his girlfriend!  
                                                                                

We had dinner at Hard Rock Café Paris and the food tasted just like America. I can’t believe with all the yummy French food around us, we went to get American food. We must be missing home.  The best part of my meal was the REAL sour cream !!! First time I ate sour cream in months!!



    

We were planning on staying with Caleb’s friend Zoe but she didn’t have internet at her apartment and we really wanted to watch the first USF basketball game online that night. We decided to go to a hotel which was awesome! We stayed very close to the Arc de Triomphe… this is a monument that I believe was built to honor soldiers who fought in the French Revolution.



                                           



The next morning we visited the Louvre museum. This museum is HUGE, so huge that there is a mall underneath it! The Louvre Pyramid was very nice and  I couldn’t help but remember the DaVinici Code ;-) When we were taking pictures outside the Louvre three soldiers got out of a tinted window unmarked car. These soldiers seriously had the biggest guns I’d ever seen…. Bigger than the soldiers in Mexico. They just started walking towards all the people, we felt really uncomfortable. That’s the first time all the talk of “terrorism” kind of spooked us.










We went shopping near all the designer shops and walking down that street I truly felt like I was in Paris. I thought all of Paris would be a perfect clean “designer” city but in actuality Paris is just like any other city with the dirty aspect. Some of the neighborhoods were really bad and we even saw a boy steal a woman’s purse!

                                                      So happy to find Starbucks to wake me up in the morning :)