Friday Night Wanderings in Paris
After work on Friday, Augusto and I decided to take a stroll around the city with the intent of making it to the Eiffel Tower. As it turns out, our office is about a block from Avenue des Champs-Élysées, so we ended up taking that street along our path. It is quite an impressive street, especially by Paris standards as it is probably the width of a normal city block. Plenty of fancy shops lined the sides, but the most impressive part by the Arc de Triomphe that lies along it.
Pictures don't really do justice to how massive the structure really is, I was quite impressed by it. What made this even better was the fact that I had no idea it was there. I may have seen pictures at some point or heard the name, but essentially I was just walking down the street when, all of the sudden, this awesome structure just sort of appeared. Cool stuff.
We continued down the Avenue George V toward the tower, where we encountered more wide streets and fancy shops. They take their fancy shops seriously in France. For example, here is a picture I snapped of the front of an Abercrombie and Fitch store:
Not only the fancy gate and garden path walkway, but just out of the picture to the right was a line to get into the store. There must have been like 30 people waiting to go shopping. Amazing. And this wasn't the only store either.
Eventually we started closing in on the tower, and we got shots of each other in front of the tower from a bridge over La Seine.
Upon reaching the tower, I was once again impressed by the size of the structure. These monuments never look so big in pictures, but it is quite awesome to be standing at the base of the thing. When we arrived the line was incredibly long and only one of the elevators was operating, so we decided to postpone actually ascending the tower for the time being and start looking toward dinner, as I was just about starving at this point.
We decided to put some distance between us and the tower before eating so as the avoid the tower-view price levels, and eventually settled on a place to eat. I had some caramelized duck which was quite delicious. On the way back we decided to the stop by Häagen-Dazs for some dessert. Apparently everything is a sit-down restaurant in France, and they had full-on menus and waiters. I suppose I should have expected that, but it was somewhat surprising nonetheless.
After dessert we walked back to the hotel and arrived home at around midnight. I was able to sleep straight through the night and woke up around 9am today, which means that I am now more or less adjusted to the time change. Great success!
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