POI:

• Louvre
• Eiffel Tower

We spent most of the daylight today touring the giant Louvre Museum. This is place is just BIG, HUGE, GIANT… With so much nice things inside one simply won’t have enough time to tour the entire place even if you spend the whole week there… I think after a while after Paris, I developed what I called the “Nice Stuff Overflow Syndrome”, which came about since there are simply so many “Nice Stuff” in Paris that I started to just go “oh, that’s nice” and moved on, as opposed to spending time to take a look and enjoy if I had seen the same item here in the States.

Anyway, we saw lots of famous statues, paintings, and artworks. They are too hard to describe and most of the time you are not allowed to take pictures. We did see Mona Lisa there, and for some reason it was really underwhelming (probably because of the Da Vinci Code hype). It was a really small painting (like smaller than my monitor at work), and it looked like all the other replicas floating around everywhere. But hey, it’s the real deal.

We had our first fulfilling meal of the trip at the museum, since we were doing the trip Asian style-o (meaning mostly DIY, supermarket food, instant noodles, etc), so the cafeteria food at the Louvre seem very satisfying to us, and we swallowed the food down.

After walking around the Louvre for most of the day, we finally came out only to walked around some more at the garden outside the Louvre, where there’s a small carnival that kids can go on rides and adluts can pay money trying to win hard-to-win prices. This is also where Jeannie had to get the French version of the popular Costco food - Churros, with a kinda funny tasting dipping sauce (it was pretty good actually).

Looking out at the skyline,
Jeannie said: “Hey look, Eiffel Tower seems to be not that far away. Let’s just walk there!”
Jack said: “Uhh… It seems to be kinda far on the map… Let’s take the Metro.”
Jeannie said: “Don’t be lazy, let’s just walk”
And hence started our 1 hour walk from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower. I would not recommand this walk if you have been walking all day in the museum since near the end Jeannie and I kept asking each other: “Are we there yet?”

The sight of the Eiffel Tower was much more impressive than seeing the Mona Lisa (interestingly, the shuttle driver from Day 1 told us the same thing). We also arrived at just the right time too, since it’s about to get dark soon and we would be able to see the Eiffel Tower during both daylight and night time.

There were 4 entrances at the 4 corners of the tower, and there were 4 very very very long lines with lots of them smoking, which gave Jeannie a really bad headache. Waiting in line for 3 hours just to get in didn’t really help the matter either, since by the time we finally got in, Jeannie was about to pass out.

The view of Paris on top of the Eiffel Tower at night is beautiful, as you see the whole city light up and easily identifing some of the famous landmarks. We were lucky that they opened up the very top level when we were there since we read that they sometimes just close it without any notice. We didn’t stay too long though since it was pretty cold on top and Jeannie had passed out (almost).

After making it down the tower we slowly walked to the closest Metro station and Jeannie started to feel better - I guess she got sick because there were just so many people there and the air was just bad due to smoking. We actually hang around the station outside and wait for the tower to light up (every 30 mins) and took some pretty cool pictures. I also had an ice cream at the street vendor while Jeannie was enjoying the street scene with people trying to sell her fake purses for $20 euros. We didn’t get home till 1:30am.

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Day 2 <-                                                                                 -> Day 4

Paris | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7