Paris: Day 2

After one of the best nights sleep in my life, we woke up to another beautiful day in Paris! Our hotel included a light breakfast, so we brought our food back to our room and ate outside. It was such a great way to start the day. 

This view never got old, and yes, we took a lot of photos!

On our second and third days in Paris, I started the day with a visit to Pierre Hermé, which was a short distance from our hotel. My brother-in-law said the raspberry croissant was one of the best things he's eaten in his life, so I was dying to try it. He was not exaggerating. It was incredible!

The ones on the left! 

Sean couldn't eat the croissants, but they had a ton of yummy macaroons from him to choose from.

On our way to the Louvre we walked past another old church we discovered to be the St. Germain des Prés. So much history everywhere in Paris!

On the bridge heading toward the Louvre

The Louvre was amazing and just as overwhelming and confusing as you'd expect in a place so huge! Our museum pass let us skip the line, though it wasn't nearly as crowded as it gets in the summer I guess. We roughly followed the map in our guide book and saw a lot of really amazing paintings and sculptures. 

 

I loved this winter scene by Monet

Of course we had to see the Mona Lisa. I have heard several people say the painting is smaller than they imagined, but it was actually opposite for me. In fact, both Sean and I thought it was bigger than we thought. I have also heard it is sort of a let down for some, but I thought it was really neat to see it in person. It is so iconic, it is hard not to be excited. The line to see it was huge but went fairly quickly. The guards took you in groups to the front, so everyone could get an unobstructed view. It was temporarily moved from its usual location, but I liked this spot because it was open and bright.

We stopped by the museum shop on our way out and ended up buying a cool print. This is the display, but I am getting ours framed right now and hopefully hung somewhere in the house soon!

After touring the Louvre for a few hours, we headed outside to the adjacent Tuileries Garden. We parked ourselves on a bench, bought a drink, and just relaxed in the beautiful scenery. This was one of my favorite parts of our trip in Paris!

From Tulieres Garden we continued our walk toward St. Chappelle. We walked along the Seine and walked by the bouquinistes along the river. It was a lot of fun looking through the carts of all of the antique books. Sean even found and bought a little book of Scottish tartans that had the McEwen (his middle name and mom's maiden name) tartan pattern in it. It was the first page he opened to, so we took it as a sign that he needed to buy it. It was crazy to me that I could just pick up and look through so many books that were so old.

We made our way over to Sainte- Chappelle to check out the stained glass windows. They were stunning in real life. 

Notre Dame is just down the street, so we headed over to see what we could during the day. It is barricaded off while restoration is ongoing, but we still got a pretty decent view. I'd like to return someday when restoration is complete and go inside. I'm grateful it is still standing and we were able to see what we did.

From here we headed to the Place des Vosges for lunch and to just check out the area and vendors. We ate lunch at a little cafe across from the square and vendors.

My lunch was awesome. Sean's was... memorable. haha He ordered sausage and this is what came out:

We joked about that sausage for the rest of our trip. He actually threw it in his backpack and kept bringing it out as a joke. I told him it would look and taste the exact same 10 years from now.

The Place de Vosges was a really cool area. We walked around checking out the vendors and I ended up buying a painting I love that I happened to spot across the street on the ground and propped up against a table while we were having lunch. The vendor told us it was painted in the 18th century. I love it! We also walked by Victor Hugo's apartment where he wrote the majority of Les Misrablés. 

Victor Hugo's apt. #6

From there we took the train to Sacre-Coeur (or at least as close as we could get). It was a decent uphill walk to get to the church, but the area was really cool. We sat on the steps and checked out the views of Paris and watched the street performers. We also bought a lock and put our initials and "15" on it for our 15th anniversary and hung it on the fence with the thousands of other locks!

I finally got a Nutella crepe on our way back to the hotel. It was soooo good. 

Pretty Paris

Somehow this painting and print survived all of our traveling and made it home with us safely! We only packed carry on bags, so I was impressed!

After getting back to the hotel, we asked the concierge for dinner recommendation, and he went ahead and made us reservations for a restaurant nearby. It was so convenient and the place he recommended was delicious!

On our way to dinner-- my street again!

An artichoke appetizer I really loved.

And french onion soup!

We finished our day with a trip up the Eiffel Tower to see the city lights. We debated whether or not to get tickets for this (we had to buy them several weeks in advance) and I am so glad we did. Paris was beautiful from the top, all lit up at night. It was fun seeing the Eiffel Tower sparkle on the half hour.

Another fantastic day in a city we fell in love with quickly!