Wednesday, March 19:
This was probably the busiest day of the trip. We took the Metro to Notre Dame, walked around the inside of the church (amazing!! and our photos of the rose windows turned out so great!!) then crossed the Pont Neuf to head toward the Louvre.
Facade of Notre Dame
Intricate stone carvings on the doorway. The figure in the center is Christ, weighing souls at judgement.
Point Zero marks the point from which all distances to/from Paris are measured.
Notre Dame's stunning rose windows.
We needed a bathroom break, so we went inside the huge Samartaine department store, which was right in front of us as we crossed the bridge. What should have been a quick trip to the restroom turned into an hour in the store—we got sidetracked looking at nine floors’ worth of merchandise! Then we went to the Louvre and spent way more time there than we intended.
It really is almost too big; there’s just so much there that it’s impossible to see everything. But we sure tried—we saw lots of famous statues: Michelangelo’s Slaves, the Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. We fought the crowds around Mona Lisa and also saw lots of works by Rembrandt. After the Louvre we sat in the Tullieries for a while (the big park in front of the Louvre) and watched the French children play with boats in a fountain.
We had planned to save the Arc de Triomphe for Thursday, but after sitting for a while, we thought, “We can walk to it. It’s not that far.” Boy were we wrong. We thought we would never get there. You can see the Arc from the Louvre, so it doesn’t look that far, but we kept walking and walking and walking, yet it never seemed to get any closer!
(This is the stretch we walked. The gray vertical line in the top center is almost the Louvre, and we took this pic from atop the Arc.)
As we walked along the Champs Elysees, I kept noticing that there weren’t any cars going up the street. I thought this was strange since it was about 5 p.m. and you’d think there would be lots of traffic. When we were almost to the Arc, we noticed about 50 French flags in the road, along with a marching band. It turns out there was some sort of parade going on; veterans were carrying the flags and marching toward the Arc de Triomphe, where there was a ceremony of some sort.
Because of the ceremony, they weren’t letting visitors go to the top. We did get some neat photos, as well as a unique chance to see a French parade and hear what sounded like patriotic French music. I definitely heard their national anthem.
This was also the day we set a record for walking—9.5 miles total (I had taken a pedometer with me to track how much walking we’d do.)
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