Paris Day 2- Dinner and the Eiffel Tower at Night

Before dinner, we took some pictures in the lobby of our hotel that I think turned out great!

Mary and Gary:



Mary, Gary, and Michael:



Mike, Shelley, Taylor and Cameron:





Steve and Nancy (and we got Nancy to smile- yay!):



Stephen and I:





The whole group:







I think the group shots turned out great!

Here is where to had dinner:



This night we sat upstairs.  Getting a group shot was hard, but we tried.





Mike kept making fun of my head tilt and smile in pictures.



Mike had fois gras as a starter.  Fois gras is duck liver that has been over fattened and is a delicacy in France.



Stephen and I shared this shrimp ravioli as a starter.  It is hard to see the ravioli, but they are in there, and this picture makes it look like it is a huge portion, but we only had a few bites each.  This dish was fantastic!!



I had lobster macaroni for my entree.



Stephen had a steak.



We were each served a little pot of potatoes.  Isn't the pot cute?



Our walk to and from dinner was beautiful.



Everyone else went back to the hotel after dinner and Stephen and I headed back to the Eiffel Tower to see it at night.  We took the subway and when we arrived we caught the tail end of the light show, which was beautiful!

The tower was so pretty at night.  These pictures don't do it justice.  I still took a ton of pictures though.









I know those are all very similar.  I have a hard time narrowing pictures down, so I just included them all.









We then crossed the Seine river so I could take some pictures of the entire tower.  I love this next picture!





We met a nice couple from LA who offered to take our picture.



Then we sat on a bench in the park and waited for the light show to start.







The light show starts on the hour and lasts for 5 minutes.  It is absolutely magical!  I had a very hard time capturing it on my camera.  I do have a video that I need to upload.  Still, nothing compares to seeing it in person.  I wish it lasted longer than 5 minutes.











It was really late at this point and we were beyond exhausted so we left to find the metro.

I took this last picture as we were walking to the metro.



On the map, it looked like the stop we needed to get to was not far at all.  We walked and walked and walked until I didn't think I could walk anymore.  We actually tried to get a taxi, but they were all full.  Finally we happened to come upon a club and asked the valet where our stop was.  Thankfully it was just one block away.



We finally made it, but it wasn't the stop we thought we were walking to.  Stephen studied the map to make sure we were at the right place.



We were so we went down to catch the train.  We had to walk a ways inside the metro station, but we were lucky they had these walking sidewalks.  I have never seen that in a subway station.





I really wanted to see the Louvre at night and our plan earlier in the evening was to take the metro from the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre and then walk back to the hotel.  At this point, we were totally exhausted and could not walk another step, so we didn't go to the Louvre.  Something else to add to the growing list of things we will have to go back to see.

Paris Day 2 was unbelievably wonderful and exhausting.  I am exhausted just reading about it and don't know how we managed to do everything we did.  It was also an absolutely wonderful day!  I completely fell in love with Paris. It reminds me a lot of my other favorite city, New York City, but is different.  When we collapsed into bed that night I felt so happy and grateful to be in this beautiful city and I couldn't wait to have another day there!

Paris Day 2- Eiffel Tower and some shopping

Ok, get ready for more pictures than you ever want to see of the Eiffel Tower.

I was so glad we got off the big red bus when we did so I could get these pictures.





I was also glad Taylor had gotten off the big red bus with us as he became our photographer.  He did a great job!  Thank you Taylor!



Stephen and Taylor were both hungry so they stopped at a food truck to get some food.  They got the french version of a kolache.  They took a baguette, stuck tongs in the middle and pulled out the bread, then stuck a hot dog in.  They both said they were great.

Here is Taylor is front of the Eiffel Tower with his french kolache.







After taking a ton of pictures of the Eiffel Tower and ourselves, we made our way to the base, where everyone else was.



Wait, we had to stop for one more picture.



Ok, now we can make our way to the base.





There are two carousels at the base of the Eiffel Tower.  This is one.







The tower across from the Seine river.





And here is the second carousel.





There were army men with machine guns walking around which was strangely comforting and frightening at the same time.  I guess this could be a huge target for terrorists and I hadn't thought about that until I saw these guys.



We made our way to the base and met up with everyone else.



Some detail shots of the tower.







They were doing some work in the middle which kind of messed up my pictures.  Thanks a lot!

The Tamas':



Steve and Nancy:



The French have a reputation for being rude to Americans, but we didn't find this to be the case at all.  We met some lovely French people on our trip.  These crepe makers; however, were extremely rude to us.  They were unnecessarily rude and I'm sure it was because we were Americans.

Shelley went to order her, Taylor and Cameron crepes.  These guys spoke English, so they understood what she was saying, but they were trying to act like they didn't and telling her she couldn't have things, asking to repeat her order, telling her that is not what she first ordered, asking her who was she buying these crepes for, etc.  It was awful!!  But we were dead set on having a crepe in front of the Eiffel Tower so we were patient with them and finally everyone got their crepes.

Here is the process:

They pour some batter on these hot plates and then use a wooden dowel to spread the batter out.



After it cooks for a while, they flip it and then add your toppings.  I just had nutella.



They spread the topping, let it sit for a minute, and then fold up the crepe.



Delicious!!







It was seriously so good!!





After we had eaten our crepes and taken way too many pictures we headed back to our hotel.  We were walking on the opposite side of where we came from and there is a park right in front of the Eiffel Tower.





I kept looking back and had to snap a few more pictures.  Hey, I warned you there were going to be a lot!





Then we all stopped to take some group pictures.

Mary and Gary:



Mike and Shelley:



Steve, Michael, and Nancy:



Stephen and I:



Taylor and Cameron:



This is one of my favorite pictures from our entire trip!!!   Taylor was taking the above picture of Stephen and I and Steve was messing with him and wouldn't get out of his face.  This is the resulting picture:



Hilarious!!  As soon as I saw it I said, this is so going on the blog!  Sorry Steve, that's what you get for messing with people!!

Ok, just one more picture of the Eiffel Tower:



We decided to take the subway back towards our hotel and we walked through this lovely neighborhood.

Paris was full of flowers every where.  They were so beautiful!





All of the street signs in Paris are on buildings.  So charming.





I have never been so happy to see a subway station!  And not for my sake, but so we could stop listening to the complaining of the group.  You would think we were asking them to walk a marathon.  Good grief!  And somehow it was all Stephen's fault since he was leading us.





Everyone else went back to the hotel to rest and Stephen and I set out to do some shopping.

Our hotel was in the Place Vendome which is a square with this statue of Napoleon in the middle.



There were very high end stores in this square.  Rolex, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, etc.



We continued walking past the square and I found this neat tea shop.



When I walked in, I was given a sample of some tea.  It was really good so I asked which one it was.  The lady gave me a yellow box and I just kept looking around.  A little while later (after finishing my cup of tea), I looked down at the box and it said detox on it, but that is all I could read.  I went back to the lady that had given it to me and asked her if that meant detox like, "it will clean you out" and made a sweeping motion with my hands.  "Oh yes", she replied "and it will work immediately".  I looked down at my empty cup and wondered why in the world they would choose that tea out of all of these to give as samples.  Luckily we didn't have any issues, but I was a little worried!



We passed a few pastry shops, but didn't get anything.  I would love a piece of that fruit tart right about now though!





We finally made it to the Galerie Vivienne.  I had read about this before we came and they have a toy store, so I wanted to get something for Stephen.  It reminded me of Chelsea Market in New York City.







This was the toy store.  So cute and charming.  It was also almost all wooden toys.



We got Stephen a wooden train.



We window shopped the other stores, but they didn't have anything that interested us.  There were also some really nice restaurants that would have been good to eat in, but we were going to dinner later, so we didn't eat here.



We walked back to our hotel, but made one last pit stop.  There was a Laduree store right across the street from our hotel.  I love French macrons and could not wait to get one!  So we headed into Laduree for a treat.













This was a chocolate store, so they only had chocolate macrons.   I was bummed by that since I'm not really a chocolate fan.  My favorite are vanilla macrons.  But I still wanted to try one, so I chose a milk chocolate and white chocolate with passion fruit filling.









They were both delicious!

We had about an hour before we were meeting everyone for dinner, so we rested our very tired feet and then got ready for dinner.

I hope you aren't tired of Eiffel Tower pictures yet because Paris Day 2 continues with dinner and then a trip to see the Eiffel Tower at night.