Our last night in Europe

The next day, we headed to the airport via train and flew back to Paris. We stayed in Paris that night at the Hotel Ibis which is actually right next to Terminal 2 in the Charles de Gaulle International Airport. Without surprise, we had the most delicious dinner at the restaurant in our hotel. (Sigh...) I miss the French cuisine. I don't necessarily think it's a specific type of food, like we can say about Chinese food or Mexican food. The food we ate in Paris was a normal variety of things, but everything was just cooked right and tasted delicious. Plus we could order tap water and not get charged for having to drink bottled water! :) For our last night in Europe, we splurged and got dessert...a molten chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. (which I have later found out you can also order at what Americans know as Olive Garden)

We spent the night in the hotel at the airport and flew home the next day (of course after the most wonderful breakfast buffet with hot freshly cooked croissants that melted in our mouth).

On the plane to New York, we got to watch Marley & Me. I cried, and then began petitioning Bryce for a dog.

We arrived in New York safely, had a 5 hour lay over, then flew home to DC.

Now, we are back at home. We had such an incredible time on our trip. As expected after such a long trip, it was almost heavenly to shower and sleep in our own place.

The rest of our time in Paris

We are glad to say that weather.com was not accurate on the weather report. Our second day in Paris was BRYCE’S BIRTHDAY!! To start the day, we had breakfast at a little café, ordered 2 croissants and a café au lait (pronounced calf-ay oo-lay). Bryce ordered a café and received a shot of espresso. When we looked in my little French words, we learned that a café is just espresso but the café au lait is like a latte. We soon began to love Paris, and learn that we were more clueless to the French language than what we thought. We walked inside Notre Dame and waited for about an hour to go up to the Towers of Notre Dame which was awesome! We almost just left because the line was taking forever and we didn’t know if it would be worth it, but it totally was. The towers were like a symbol of medieval Paris (and the hunchback Quasimodo’s home). We learned all about Notre Dame, thanks to a brochure of the history in English, and read that it was a project that took nearly 200 years to complete! It was a long haul to the top in a tight spiral staircase, but an incredible view of Paris, the Seine River and the Eiffel tower at the top. After Notre Dame, we walked to the Louvre and grabbed a “Take away” lunch of a fresh crepe with nutella and a toasted sandwich similar to what we know as a panini. When we arrived at the Louvre, it was about 3pm and many people told us that the Louvre takes an entire, so we decided to go to the Musee d’Orsay. This museum was really relaxing and fun to see. There were works from many famous artists including Pissarro, Renoir, Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet, Manet, Degas, and Cezanne. We headed back to the hotel to hang out and check email. For dinner, we walked about 20 feet from the hotel to a tiny Tibetan restaurant, as requested by the birthday boy. We ordered Tibetan buttered tea, which ended up being very literal with melted butter in a milky hot tea, a chicken and noodle dish, steamed beef dumplings and a water cress salad. We finished off dinner with a birthday cake..—I mean with coconut rice pudding and raisins. It was actually a really fun dinner J

Our third day we slept in until about 9:30ish. For breakfast, we had croissants and both ordered café au laits. We walked down the Seine river to the Louvre and spent almost the whole day there. It is the world’s largest museum with thousands of artifacts from ancient Egypt to ancient Greece, the Renaissance and pretty much everything you can imagine. We saw famous works like the Mona Lisa, a huge painting of the Wedding feast at Cana (it’s more than 20ft high and 30ft wide!). We also saw beautiful sculptures like the Venus de Milo, Nike, and many more. Afterwards, we headed back to our hotel, relaxed and went to bed early.

On Monday, we walked to the Eiffel Tower, took our last pictures, and headed to the airport to fly to Sevilla, Spain. Paris was really fun, but we were excited to see new places too.

Bonjour Paris!

We got to Paris yesterday morning at about 11am (it was an all night flight). The weather was beautiful yesterday, and was supposed to be overcast and rainy this weekend. We are in Paris until Monday evening. So, as soon as we arrived, we stopped by our hotel, Hotel du Commerce, which is located in the "Latin Quarter"--awesome place with cafes, book shops, restaurants and La Sorbonne University. It's right in the city, so we've been able to walk almost anywhere; we are a 10 minute walk to Notre Dame and a 20 minute walk to the Louvre Museum. The Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe are a little farther away so we took the metro there. Taking advantage of the nice weather yesterday, we did a full walking tour of the city and saw major sites like Notre Dame, the Seine river, Luxembourg gardens and the palace, the Louvre Museum, and Tuileries gardens. We did not actually enter any buildings, but we did go to the Eiffel Tower and climbed to the 2nd floor (1,652 stairs). It was awesome!! We were just in time to watch the sunset. Sunset from the Eiffel Tower=epitome of romantic moment. This day concluded 48 hours of traveling and touring New York City and Paris with only 4 hours of sleep on the plane in between. Hooray for a bed and a good night sleep!!