And now, we arrive in Paris---the city of love, the city of pastries and the city of....crazy butt birds. This below is us visiting the Sacred Heart Cathedral. It's beautiful on the outside and the inside!
And these are the crazy birds I was talking about. They will fly just a foot away from your face, to try and get your food. No joke. These guys swarmed me once I pulled out a sandwich. Jeebers!
That brown blur in front of me is the bird. >< And on the left, this little guy got inches away from me! The audacity of the feathered fiend.
Sadly, no pictures of the inside, cause they ain't allowed. However, there were tons of vendors on the steps, and this little warning on one of the side paths made us laugh. How kind of them to warn us, am I right?
Below, this is our visit to the Notre Dame Cathedral! They allowed pictures, yay! I loved the architecture in Europe, if you can't tell by some of my odd pictures. And I love the reverence in the cathedrals we visited---it kind of secluded you from the noisy tourists outside.
I put this in here for Fathia and her boys; I thought it looked like the shadow of a Weeping Angel from Doctor Who. xD It creeped me out for a second.
I liked the simplicity of this one much more than the rest---many had tons of statues, gold ornamentation, etc. I feel like those kinds of things distract from the beauty of the church. A month or two before we arrived, was Notre Dame's 850th anniversary! To think they built something this immense and incredible with such limited tools.
This was just a pretty fountain we found during our walk.
Somebody has a sense of humor. ;D
Here we are, at one of the entrances. Lion on the outside, lioness on the inside.
Da Vinci Code, anyone?
After strolling around the courtyard for a while, we walked to the Arc de Triumphe. Bigger than I expected.
See that dark dot in the middle of the flower? That's a camera, and when you're inside up top, you can look down on the people below through a large screen. We thought it'd be cool if one of us took a picture of the other in the screen from a bird's eye view, but that'd have taken a lot longer.
Stairs to the top. O.O
From here, we went to the Eiffel Tower! It was smaller than I imagined, but still incredible all the same. It's amazing such a structure could be built of metal, having thousands of bolts and beams holding it together. We didn't go inside, cause the top was closed and the lines were long; it didn't seem to be worth our time. And we had so little of it in Paris.
Below on the right is the tower at night. It was funny, because once we got out of the subway station, we were swamped by a huge group of asian tourists who ran out, and at the stroke of 11, started yelling. The tower lit up, sparkling all over. We laughed at their expense. ;D
War museum, yay! Didn't go inside either. Not a very good museum-goer.
Sun dials! I thought they were really neat. ^^
Just like in Rome, they like statues on their bridges. Both locations, they liked gold ones too.
This is a park we went through to slowly make our way towards the Opera House, and then a bus to the airport.
This obelisk was given to France as a gift from Egypt, and this plaque above shows the ship they built to transport it. Pretty amazing, if you ask me.
And....the Opera House! Here, we searched everywhere in a six block radius to find a pastry shop, since Fathia said, "If you're coming to Paris, you can't leave without eating one of their pastries." And seriously. Americans screwed up crepes. Theirs were freaking delicious.
The top left turned out to have coffee in it. So, we tossed that. Yuck. The top right was an apple spiral pastry thing. Yummy, and very light on the palate. Nothing strong in there to overwhelm you. Middle left, is a raspberry chocolate tart. Um...yum! Bottom left, a chocolate creme puff. So good! And the bottom right is a vanilla flan. Delicious, but I had to take small bites it was so dense and rich.
And that's our leg of the trip in Paris, last stop, London!
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