Friday, February 24, 2012

Honeymoon in Paris Days 1-3

I've been meaning to write about our Honeymoon for just about forever now. Now that I'm actually taking time to sit down and do this thang, I realize it's going to take more than one post. There are WAY too many awesome pictures to have to narrow them down to a reasonable size. I just can't do it. We'll see how far I can get tonight ;)


Day One: Our flight to Chicago left the day after the wedding at 6 a.m. Daniel and I were both pretty exhausted but couldn’t sleep until we got on the actual flight to Paris, otherwise it totally would have messed up our highly planned sleeping strategy so as to not catch any jet-lag. Unfortunately, our flight to Paris didn’t leave until about 6 p.m., so we were going to have to practice some serious self-control. 

Dan looks so tired he's about to cry

And then he just started to lose it...

While we had the best of intentions, we both slept on the Chicago flight (I may or may not have slept the entire way…) and during our wait in the airport. We finally got on the plane to Paris and Daniel got some good sleep in while I wasted time watching two movies the plane provided. 8 hours later, we were in the city of LOVE!!!

Day Two:  We made it to the CDG airport and realized neither of our cards would work in Paris when we tried to buy bus/metro tickets which proved to be a bit stressful and frustrating, but we eventually found an ATM in a nearby terminal. 



The hubs totally nailed his first of many metro navigations and we took a bus then metro to the hotel. The hotel wasn’t ready when we got there so we left our bags and walked around the area a bit. Daniel and I were both starving so we stopped at a restaurant and had our first Parisian meal!



 Little did we know, that while there were restaurants like this on just about every corner, they were by far the MOST expensive way to eat. We only ate in a place like this twice the whole time we were in Paris because it was so ridiculously overpriced for mediocre food. However, this little place did a great job of welcoming us to its beautiful city. The seating in Paris is all very close together, and Daniel had a great conversation with this cute old French couple while I snacked at his fries which, by the way, are eaten with forks in France. Weird.  Once we finished eating, we headed back to the hotel to unpack and sleep. We were way to tired to venture out and explore too much that night so we picked up a loaf of bread and some cheese from some local shops for dinner. 

All the bread we got from the little bakeries was absolutely AMAZING! We ate bread and cheese or sausage for dinner almost every night. No complaints from me!

Day Three: The hubs and I woke up and ate... leftover bread for breakfast! I'm tellin you, that stuff was amazing! Then we took the metro down to the Eiffel tower, which really did not disappoint (shocking, I know).

Seriously though, how beautiful is this?!

After walking around for a little while, we found a cute little boulangerie (sandwich place) and had a really yummy lunch. Those hole in the wall places were the BEST for food, not to mention way less expensive than anywhere else. 


Once our bellies were full, we took a boat tour of Paris where we saw a lot of the major sites, but not before taking a few pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower!

This is one of my FAVORITE pictures from the trip. I swear I didn't tell him to pose like that, it just happened.

It was a little chilly!


 It was pretty cold on the river, but so fun! I loved getting a preview of all the fun places we would end up seeing later that week...and it was a nice break from all the walking we had done thus far. We also loved getting to hear all the history behind these beautiful buildings via our little...info thingis? I don't know what to call them....

The cool info thingis. They played in a TON of different languages!

Here are just a few of the many pictures I took on this boat tour. There were just SO MANY beautiful buildings!!! 

Crazy how this was a totally normal thing to see everywhere in Paris  

No idea what this is, but it's lovely!

I've decided we will live in an apartment complex like this one day 

Can't remember what this one is either...


Notre Dame- SO BEAUTIFUL!!!


Seriously this building is SO gorgeous

After the awesome boat tour of Paris, we walked around the Christmas village in front of Eiffel tower, which I totally loved. It was basically this huge Christmas flea market...in Paris...in front of the Eiffel Tower. What more could I ask for?


I convinced the hubs to take a few pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower because I strongly believe you could never have enough pictures. Ever. Especially when those pictures are taken in Paris. Have I mentioned what a trooper Dan was during all this? I almost always had him ask some random Parisian to take a picture of the two of us, so not only did he have to get through smiling for all these, but he also had to do most of the dirty work ;)

Daniel bought me that cute hat from one of the little shops in the Christmas Village :)

Think we were done after that? No way! We had to make up for our lack of sight-seeing the day before so after the Christmas Village, we walked over to the Arc De Triomphe. It was really fun to see it at night all lit up and everything. We though about going up to the top but...they charged way too much for that and we figured our view was just fine.

Not the best quality, but still a good one!

It was so crowded!

The Arc De Triomphe is at the end of the Champs Elysees, which is just this really famous street that has a TON of awesome stores...including big name car stores (yeah, Dan loved that). It was all lit up for Christmas which was beautiful but it was also SO ridiculously crowded. We had to fight to just walk down the sidewalk, it was awesome!

A weirdo car we saw in one of the European car stores 




As we were walking down this awesome street, a group of dancers somehow managed to clear a space big enough to show off some sweet moves. These guys were very...entertaining ;)


By the time we had made it down this street, we were beyond exhausted and hopped on the metro back to our hotel. Dinner was some more bread from a local bakery with some more (incredibly stinky) cheese and some fresh sausage from a totally legit italian store around the corner from our hotel. Great end to a fantastic day!

No comments:

Post a Comment