Exploring Paris

Fountain at La Place de la Concorde

Arc De Triumphe

Miss and SL at the Eiffel Tower

Miss in the Courtyard at the Louvre

We decided to purchase a “Hop On, Hop Off” double-decker sightseeing bus pass for two days to try to maximize the effectiveness of our two days (three nights) there. I am not sure if this was a wise decision. Apart from allowing Melissa to experience the red-light region of the Moulin Rouge again, where we had to board the bus, the route included many very long stops – up to twenty minutes. The sound quality on the “guided tour” was reminiscent of a Burger King drive-through. It was also not cheap – E$103 – about $140.00.

But we DID get an all-star tour of the many incredible sights that Paris has to offer. They say it is the most visited city in the world, and not without reason. The architecture is amazingly beautiful, with a masterpiece around every corner.

On our tour it seemed that every building we saw had been immortalized in film and/or popular culture: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The glass pyramid of the Louvre at the climax of The DaVinci Code, the CN Tower in …. oh wait.

The Eiffel Tower (nicknamed La dame de fer, The Iron Lady) is an iron lattice tower located on the Champ de Mars in Paris, named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Erected in 1889 as the entrance arch to the 1889 World's Fair, it has become both a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world. The tower is the tallest structure in Paris and the most-visited paid monument in the world.

The tower stands 320 metres (1,050 ft) tall, about the same height as an 81-story building. During its construction, the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument to assume the title of the tallest man-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years, until the Chrysler Building in New York City was built in 1930. However, because of the addition, in 1957, of the antenna atop the Eiffel Tower, it is now taller than the Chrysler Building. .

We chose not to climb the tower as it was a four hour wait in line, but the sight of it was awe inspiring, and we sat on the bus and listened to a story about a scientist who was testing a parachute he had designed, who jumped from the tower and fell to his death. (We are not 100% sure about this, the sound quality being what it was – it could have been “Well, he was next”, or “Hell, he was Deaf”). Regardless, the parachute was not a best-seller.

We next bussed on to Notre Dame de Paris (French for "Our Lady of Paris"), also known as Notre Dame Cathedral or simply Notre Dame, an historic Roman Catholic Marian cathedral. Widely considered one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture and among the most well-known churches ever built, Notre Dame is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris; that is, it is the church that contains the cathedra (official chair) of the Archbishop of Paris, currently André Vingt-Trois. We were actually privileged to be there while the mass was taking place. André did a passable job, but was unavailable for my constructive criticism in a de-brief afterwards. The cathedral treasury is notable for its reliquary, which houses the purported crown of thorns, a fragment of the True Cross and one of the Holy Nails – all instruments of the Passion and a few of the most important first-class relics.

On to the Musée du Louvre in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre—one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, France, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine. Nearly 35,000 objects from prehistory to the 19^th century are exhibited over an area of 60,600 square metres (652,300 square feet)..

The museum opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property. Because of structural problems with the building, the museum was closed in 1796 until 1801. The size of the collection increased under Napoleon and the museum was renamed the Musée Napoléon.

To try to describe all of the sights we saw would take many, many blogs. On our second day we got off the bus at Notre Dame and at the Louvre, walked the Champs Elysée, had a cappuccino at a cafe on the Seine, stopped to listen to the street musicians, bought a painting from a street artist and ended up back at our little hotel having walked about 6 miles, thoroughly exhausted and thoroughly in agreement with why Paris is the world's most visited city.