Paris Trip Day 4

Let me just apologize in advance for the excess display of pictures in this post. My excuse is that it is very late thus I am feeling very indecisive about which ones I wanted to display, so there you have them all. Sorry. So Thursday we had the entire day to ourselves, tourguide-free! So Stephen and I left to meet everyone at the Louvre at 11:30 at the giant pyramid. On our way there, at exit to the metro, we discovered a little shopping trip, so we stopped in a music store, which actually turned out to be quite useful later on. We were able to listen to a lot of samples, but not to purchase but keep looking for a cheaper place to buy. We met Sarah, Leah, and a few others at the Louvre and saw the highlights, quickly got museumed out, and hit the streets. Don't get me wrong, I love looking at art and being in museums. But some days, it can just be so draining and exhausting and you just get tired of being a tourist. At least I do.

So we started to wander. We found a bookstore and a really cool cd store. Well, it had its pros and cons. On the plus side, most of their cds were only like 3 Euros each, which is amazing, but on the downside it was the most disorganized place ever. So it could have everything you ever wanted, but good luck finding it. So we spend several hours in there, looking for good french music. I ended up getting to new French cds that I'm quite excited about, and I found a cheap cd of the Kinks (American) that I love.

Afterwards we wandered some more, and eneded up heading towards the Eiffel Tower where we were supposed to meet the group that night. We decided to do the traditional french thing, so we got crepes and took them to a little grassy spot by the tower and just enjoyed them and took our shoes off and layed in the grass and leaves and took pictures (lots of pictures, obviously (oh, in case you didn't know, if you want to see a picture closer up, I think you can just click on it to enlarge it)), and relaxed for several hours. It was so nice just to be outside and not be a tourist. Well ok, we were sitting right under the Eiffel Tower, but what I mean is, it was nice not to be running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to see and do everything, you know?

We met up with the whole group and then did the cool thing and took the elevator to the top of the tower. Let me just say, it was freezing. Really. Il a fait tres froid. It was really cold. So we stood up there and tried to embrace the cold for as long as we could before we couldn't take it any longer, and then we took the stairs back down! Afterwards we had a nice nighttime boat ride on the Seinne, also cold, before finally making it back to our hotel for our last night in Paris.