Paris, day eight….
February 21st, 2017 kennyrSo today (Feb 20) was our first full day in Paris, but we didn’t exactly hit the ground running. It was more of a slow stumble, then finally making it up to walking speed. I am still not feeling great, but much better than Sunday, so we tried to-do simpler things today.
After breakfast in our hotel, our first stop was a SfR store which was right around the corner. We needed to trade in our London SIM’s and purchase Paris SIM’s for our phones. I known it is crazy to buy local SIM’s for just five days, but we use our phones for so much. We navigate using Google Maps, we SMS back and forth when separated and even right now I’m using it to write this update. (Internet in the hotel feels like 56k dial up) The $25 it costs each of us is well worth it.
After re-connecting to the world again, we hit Starbucks and found the Crossfit gym Rosie wants to try. There is some big competition that goes around the world next week and it all starts in Paris Thursday night. (She is suppose to take a class tomorrow, but we’ll see if it happens)
After that we headed to a large shopping mall that Rosie found earlier, because I needed to buy a new pair of shoes. I couldn’t believe it, but I wore out the pair brought. We have been doing 15K step days according to my FitBit and I had wore a hole on the ride insole. So after getting lost in the mall and figuring out the Men’s section was across the street, I found a nice new pair of shoes. Not much to add, but we did walk by the Paris Apple Store, hopefully we will get to go back tomorrow and actually go inside.
By this time it was lunch time, so we stopped at another close little mall/food court. I had a pickle and ham sandwich, which was pretty good. Rosie went hunting for fresh squeezed OJ, while Isaac and I wondered around. We ended up coming away with a bunch of fruit and two bottles of Rosie squeezed OJ.
At this point we needed todo some actual site seeing, so we headed off to see the Place Vendome, which has the large green column in the middle with the statue on top. The court yard is ringed by fancy stores and famous hotels now. I took some pictures, but it was so grey yesterday, it really doesn’t capture the place.
At this point, we headed back to the hotel for a break.(Remember, I was feeling pretty crappy) I changed my shoes and everybody chilled out for a while. In the afternoon we decided to visit Musée de l’Orangerie, which turned out to be really close to Place Vendome.
This was the top place I wanted to go in Paris, because it is where Monet’s Water Lily murals are located. They are just as amazing as I expected. I didn’t know this, but the two rooms where they are housed were specially built to specs by Monet. The rooms have these giant windows in the ceilings for light, but the light is difused by these screens. I thought about trying to take a pictures of it, but decided it was just not going to be possible to capture them. For those that don’t know, the murals are about five feet tall and over 30 feet long. They literally wrap around the room, since each wall is curved. There are eight total.
So on the way to Musée de l’Orangerie, we pasted through the Tuileries Garden’s, which were apart of a large palace. Since it is the end of winter still, it looked pretty sparse. But you can tell how amazing it would be during the spring or summer when all the tree’s are in bloom. There is a giant ferries wheel at one end and community gardens and lots of kids play grounds.
So at this point, we headed to a early dinner (super early for Paris) and then back to the hotel. I wanted to go to bed early. As it turned out, we found a pharmacist on the way back and was able to get some more meds for my cold. As I finish writing this the next morning, I feel way better today. I also slept for 11 hours and completely missed breakfast.
I realized that I also got my first view of the Eiffel Tower yesterday, but I had to blow up the picture and mess with the lighting a little to see it. Today we are going to-do a bus tower of the city.