DAY 8 - Paris

What do you do if you have one day in paris? Well we tried to pack in as much as we could. Starting with going to the Lourve. Once again we met the line of waiting people (we even went through the sneaky back entrance, apparently everyone knows the sneaky back entrance) The Louvre is huge. It is ornate. Frankly it is overwhelming, a tour guide later said to us don’t feel bad if after a couple of hours you just want to leave cause it is too much. So true. We made a beeline for the Mona Lisa, the crowd was impressive, however we were told off for trying to take photos of people trying to take photos of the painting. Go figure. We wandered around looking at the art seeped in history that we found difficult to comprehend coming from such a young country.

We then took the Metro in a quick tour of Notre Dame and back to the opera house ending back at the Eiffel Tower in time for our bike tour.

Before the bike ride Kath decided we needed a little local interaction. She needed a sim card. Easy enough. Wrong. The smartly turned out young man (cute lets call him Peire) spoke very little English and his friend marginally more. It ended up that the customer with a smattering more English helped us realise that Kaths phone was blocked so no sim card would work even the one she just brought. I liked the moment that the Piere rubbed his face in frustration and muttered under his breath in French, non verbal communication at its best. Even if we didn’t understand much most people were very friendly, the security guard at the bank talked to us about All Blacks in fact that is the main connection for most French people we met.

Anyway we got to go on a fat tyre bike tour around Paris. 40 people majority haven’t been on a bike in years, should be asking for trouble. Fortunately no accidents however the weather didn’t play ball half way around as we left the Lourve the heavens opened and we were drenched. A side stop in an outdoor café with strange French waiters that sung songs and smacked each other on the bottoms. Dripping into our crepes, chocolat and café au laits, we watched the rain pour down wondering if we would make it back. We did. Rain cleared and biked like experts on the roads, paths and parks back to the Eiffel Tower.

We had a tea under the Eiffel tower watched by a homeless man and many men waiting to try and sell us Eiffel tower key rings (tour guide Emma has set us the task of beating her 16 for 2 euro). The homeless man got some food and one lucky man got some of our money, Jess bargined her way to 20 for 3 euros. She tried to convince him she was doing him a favour taking so many off his hands. He did not agree but sold them anyway.

As we were too cheap to go to the live Carbert show or the night river cruise, we thought “hey lets take the metro back to the hotel” Huddling in our still damp clothes we poured over the metro map next to the stairs debating about where we were (Kath was right) Giving up we descended into the much warmer underground. We should have had our debate inside in retrospect. It was fairly simple to get to the right line. Unfortunately there were 15 stops before ours. After an epic train ride, a slight detour finding our hotel we reached our rooms to collapse and dream of Paris, or if you were Kath about missing flights from Mandeville.

(Sorry the internet where we are staying at the moment is painfully slow so we'll try put photos up sometime soon...)