Here you can see the Eiffel Tower and how it is sooooooo much taller than everything else in the city. They have a law regarding height restriction of buildings now, so it's really cool how much it makes the Eiffel Tower stand out.
After this we walked down the Champs-Elysees, which is Paris' famous boulevard with lots of expensive shops and stretches 2 miles long. The first part of this street opened in 1667 and soon became THE place to be seen cruising in your carriage! Now it just looked similar to the Mag Mile or something you would see in most big cities. The only thing that was a little odd was that they had car dealerships on this street and apparently you have no hope of selling cars unless you have a showroom on the Champs-Elysees. We walked inside a few and they would just have about 5 cars on display, but they were super fancy or weird cars- not like what you would see here!
Once all the shops ended, we arrived at Place de la Concorde, marked by a tall obelisk (monument). This was the spot where the guillotine was that beheaded many of the 2780 people during the Revolution. Louis XVI and Mari-Antoinette were the people I recognized that were killed here.
We then walked through the Tuileries Garden, which is basically just a huge beautiful park outside of the Louvre. We grabbed lunch from a little stand here.
We then entered the Louvre, which was ENORMOUS. Everyone says how big it is, but you really can't understand until you are there and see it.
We actually explored A LOT of it-- I would guess we saw 75-80% of the rooms. My legs were really tired and Dustin would spend 5 times longer than me in each room, so luckily they had plenty of benches for me to sit on and rest and wait for him! The Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo were really the 2 famous things there that I knew...since I'm not really into Art. Then there was just a lot of really interesting things from history from a long time ago...this was more interesting to me than looking at the paintings. I really did get a better understanding of how our society has progressed-- I really was amazed at the items found from so long ago and that they had the ability to create stuff like that! So just imagine hundreds of rooms similar to below-- they usually contained paintings, sculptures, or what I would call artifacts.
I think Dustin finally realized just how tired I was, so we left and grabbed some dinner at Germain and it was good, but small portions. I had a Truffle Pasta that was fantastic! It was funny cause we liked the look of the restaurant, kinda modern and trendy, but since we had been out touring all day we weren't sure if we were dressed appropriately to eat dinner there. So I was like- well let's just ask and if they tell us no, then we'll just go somewhere else. So the girl at the door says we are find and to come in for dinner....so then she leads us to this back room where no one else is sitting and says I can offer you this table or this table...both of which are like hidden behind this wall! I was trying not to die laughing as we sat down cause I'm like obviously we weren't dressed well and they did not want people on the outside to be able to look into the restaurant and see us...so we got hid in the back. Two other couples later got seated back there...both looked as touristy as us! oh well!
