Day 3 – Paris

Day Three – Paris:
This is probably going to be the most exciting day of the entire trip. We arrived at our hotel around noon (we learned from past mistakes and simply took a taxi). Our hotel was right next to the Eiffel Tower, and we could see it from our room!! Our first destination was Champs-Elysees. And not for shopping! It was the final day of le Tour de France. We waited patiently (or impatiently) for 2 hours in order to have a good spot for the final leg of the race. In the process we ate a giant hot dog on a baguette and paid 3 Euro ($4.50 USD, even though I'm not converting) for a can of coke! (This was normal everywhere we went though). The racers do laps along the Champs-Elysees, so we got to see them many times! After the final lap, we waited impatiently for an hour, for all of the teams to do their victory lap. It was worth it though, as it put us within 10 feet of Lance Armstrong. Unfortunately, he didn't stop and propose to me, like I had expected. We were that close to Contador, the race winner, but that just wasn't as exciting. I <3 Lance.

After a long day of standing, we were starving. (Maybe we've been eating too much). We both had specific things we wanted to try, so we went to a French restaurant. I started my meal with escargot, and Natalie had French onion soup. We both had risotto for dinner, with wine. For dessert Natalie had crème brulee, and I had chocolate lava cake yet again (chocoholics anonymous, here I come – but the waiter recommended it!!). It was fancier though, and came with vanilla sauce. We ate inside the restaurant, along the window, and it was open – so it was a lovely temperature and fun to people watch. We also got to see a precious mouse in the ceiling above us. See, the critters are all around!

After this 2-3 hour culinary tour (seriously, they are in NO hurry), we went to the Eiffel Tower. We were going to climb it, but it turned out the wait to walk it was the same as the wait for the elevator, so we opted for the lazy way (we knew we had a lot planned for Day 4, so we didn't want to be in too much pain!). Paris at night (and day) is simply stunning. I think Bruxelles deserves the reputation that Paris has. Everyone was nice (although many of them did get paid [e.g., hotel, restaurants, shops, etc.], but even still, that didn't seem to matter in Bruxelles). We finally got to bed around 1am.