Early morning. Up before the sun to drop off our rental car and get in the airport. I’m too out of it to take pictures. But our flight is 5 hours long and not very fun. I do not recommend Cyprus Airways if you can avoid it.

But Paris has a pretty swanky airport.

We were shuffled out through customs quicker than I expected, grabbed our luggage, and headed off to the train station/metro. There, we bought some snacks and a Navigo pass for the week – use the metro trains as often as you want for a whole week to anywhere in (and slightly outside) Paris for $35.

We did not buy these. I was just thoroughly amused.

I did buy this. It was pretty dang good.

Pretty stereotypical view for Paris, from our experience. Homes/residences/rooms on the upper floors, businesses on the bottom. I think there may have been some taller buildings in the far off distance, but for the most part, we didn’t see buildings much taller than these.

I don’t know what this shop was but we passed it on the way to the hotel and of course I needed a picture of this very obvious caricature.

Not the best shot of the road, but this is our residence for the week. Those blue christmas ornaments mark the door of the Hotel Elixir (definitely recommend this place) and further down, at the overhang/corner of the building, is a bakery called Paris Baguette, where we went every single morning for breakfast. If I had access to pastries like that every day, I’d easily weigh 300lbs, even with all the walking.

After getting settled in, we took off towards the Louvre, which we’re only a few blocks from. That fantastic building is the Palais de la Cite, which houses a number of things, none of which we went to on this trip. Maybe next time. Super cool sight to see every day.

For some reason, we were having trouble buying tickets online for the Louvre while in Cyprus. My credit card company (Chase) never pinged me about fraud, so I wasn’t sure what the issue was. So we were going to to buy them in person for Wednesday, since they would be closed tomorrow.

So if the Palais de la Cite is a cool sight, the Louvre is incredible. It’s huge. I can’t even encompass the scope properly with words. It’s a massive, long, ornate, giant building.

This is somewhere JA has rally wanted to visit for a long, long time. Glad we’re here.

While waiting in line to get entrance to buy tickets, I was able to connect to the wifi and attempted to purchase tickets again since we were at the physical location. Lo and behold, yep, Chase flagged the Louvre ticket site as potential fraud and I finally got a message asking if it was me trying to purchase tickets. So we were able to buy them online finally. Which was nice because the line was long and it was cold outside. So off we went to get a very ok doner kebap (man, I was seriously hoping for at least one good one this trip, but apparently Paris isn’t the place for that either), then to the hotel to settle in and take a break before going out for dinner.

This neat monument was near our hotel as well. I don’t think I have a good picture of what the street is like at night, but it’s mostly bicycles and mopeds, only some cars. So many bicycles though! With dedicated lanes! I wish that was more common in the states.

We had so many nice little walkways lined with bars and restaurants and shops to chose from. So many people were out and about too (I’m assuming this was normal since we were in what’s considered the off-season for tourism here too). We ended up at a little Asian restaurant and split some decent ramen and ‘bo bun’ which is, essentially, Vietnamese beef noodle salad, but the beef is french-onion soup flavored/marinated with onions, topped with fried spring rolls, and is delicious. I think we got bo bun at least three times this trip.

Good stuff.