Paris Part 1: Je suis en Paris!

PARIS is (and I think always will be) my favorite city in all my travels. When I was 17, I fell in love with the city, and 3 years later my love continues to grow. I was really excited when I found out that we'd be spending the majority of our excursion in "The City of Love."

From Reims we got into Paris at around 2:30pm and checked into our hotel. There we met our tour guide, Julianne and then took the metro to Fat Tire Bike Tours where we began our bike tour through the streets of Paris. I have never thought I was going to die on a bike more times in my life than I did that day. I'm not really sure what the rules are in Paris but in America we're not really ones to bike through oncoming traffic at will. The other thing that made it difficult was the fact that there were 20+ of us to keep track of an dsome of us clearly had more experience with bikes than others. Furthermore, it decided to rain on us so it cut the tour a little short. Don't get me wrong through all of my griping though, I actually thoroughly enjoyed the tour. Even though I had seen all of the sights we saw, I think being on a bike gave me a fresh perspective. To be perfectly honest, I think I felt more Parisian bicycling through the city. I just had to forget the 20 of my peers trekking along behind me.

Paris is an architectural masterpiece and I wanted to take more in, however the did not permit it so we returned our bikes and made our way to the restaurant where we'd be having dinner. We assembled into this tiny restaurant our program had booked for us, so we were the only ones eating there which was pretty cool. They try and take us to restaurants with cultural significance so the one we were at tonight was a creperie. In France, crepes are an all day thing- breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I have no problem with this. I had a crepe with cheese, potatoes, cream, and ham for dinner. It was really good but super filling. Of course I had to save room for dessert though. I ordered a crepe with strawberry jam. Yum. Once again, it reminded me of being home on Sunday mornings when my mom would make my sister and I crepes with jam. It was a nice way to end the day and it was only day number 1.
On day 2, we took a walking tour of the Louvre which was cool but I'd already seen most of the works our tour guide was pointing out. I really wanted to go off and explore on my own. The Louvre is massaive, and there is so much I've yet to see. It just gives me all the more reason to return someday. After the Louvre, we took a walking tour of the Latin Quarter which I was really excited about because it was a part of Paris I had never seen before. I really liked it. It was very bohemian and certainly a lot different than everything else we had seen thus far. Afterwards my plan was to take a nap but that didn't really go as planned so I got a bite to eat and (because we thought we were late) raced with my friends to the Eiffel Tower, our meeting point for the night. Once there, our group made our way up the Tower and took lots of pictures together. I'd already been up before 3 years ago but it was definitely a new experience with the new group. On top of the Eiffel Tower I couldn't help but to think a) how lucky I am to have this experience and b) how glad I am to be with such a great group of people. I'm a very lucky boy.