Paris and The Eiffel Tower...

We were both pretty knackered, so I didn’t set the alarm and instead had a lazy (for us) start to the day. After breakfast we walked up to the Eiffel Tower, The guy who owned the apartment said it was a 10 minute walk but in reality it was more of a 20 minute walk!

Ebi-kun noted that there were so many beautiful buildings but also asked why people graffitied on such lovely places, I had no answer.

We arrived about 9.30am and already the queues were long. We decided to walk up to the 2nd floor and then decide if we wanted to tackle another queue to get to the top.

It took us 40 minutes to get tickets to walk up and € 5 but not too long to make it up to the first floor. Yes, that is glass on the floor and yes, they are the queues of people waiting to get in.

We had a break there and a Pain Au Chocolat to celebrate, after a wee break we continued to the 2nd floor. Our first French pastry, up the Eiffel tower, we know how to roll!

The views are pretty impressive but I felt Paris was much smaller compared to London and Tokyo. Luckily it was a beautiful day so we could get a great view.

But the queues... we could only make it around 2 sides of the tower because of the queues for the lift to go to the top. We had a chat and Ebi-kun really didn’t want to stand in a line for an hour plus, so we had another half lap of the second floor then headed back down.

Ebi-kun treated himself to a pack of Top Trumps and got a mini tower for daddy and we headed out. By this time we were getting hungry so we had a delicious crepe in the park just the other side of the river Seine, took in the views and watched the tourists milling around. Then we headed up to the Musee De Art Moderne, it was actually really hot in the afternoon so we just wanted to shelter from the heat.

The museum was free and not busy at all, we had a good wander and got to see some great pieces of work. As it was still too hot for us feeble English tourists so we nursed a drink in the cafe and played Top Trumps until we could face heading outside again.

Eventually we made a move and wandered back over the Seine and through the gardens to make our way back to the apartment. We could have jumped on the metro but you miss so much when you are underground. To be honest, I really have to start doing Tokyo above ground because I rely on the trains and miss much of it!

We had to make a stop at the park for a play, it had great equipment, all the play parks we saw looked fun. I did think to myself that it looked like a fashion shoot come to life, all the kids were so well dressed!

When I was researching Paris I came across THIS SITE which is great, he is an American living in paris and gives you the low down but not in a boring tourist website way. One of the things he mentioned was the pixel graffiti art and so this became the challenge for the week. I will do a round up of them all at the end but this is the first one we found. They are little mosaic on random buildings.

We made it back to our end of town without too much trouble and tried out one of the little cafes on our street. Food was great, waiters were rude, I would expect nothing less. For an idea of prices, my salad was €13 and Ebi-kuns €14.

Then it was back home and collapsing into bed! Tomorrow, Daddy arrives!