Paris Day 1- Airplane, RER, Ile de la Cité, Notre Dome, City, Arch De Triumph

On the Airplane: Air Tahiti
It was funny to fly on an airplane with mostly all Polynesian stewardesses and everyone assuming we spoke French, especially since we were flying out of California. I could understand the assumption if we were leaving Paris.

Can you tell how excited Becca was to be rocking (bouncing) the bassinet. Thankfully SP loved it but it was exhausting. We took turns but we would do almost anything to get her to sleep and stop crying.

Sunrise over Killarney, Ireland

Right: Riding on the RER (so proud of us not getting lost)
Left: Figuring out where the hotel is

Our first Monument: Arch De Triumph
Became "my" monument as the week grew on since we saw it everyday.

Our Hotel

I loved that in the bathroom they only had half the wall tiled in the Eiffel Tower but the mirror filled in the rest. It was a very "hip" hotel. Not my style especially the bright NEON blue/red lights in the elevator but it was very nice. The staff were super sweet and helpful and everyone spoke English too.

After a nap at the hotel for everyone along with showers and a change of clothes we set off on a walking tour Rebecca downloaded from her tour guide book "Rick."

The streets of Paris

The Tour starts at Notre Dame
(on the Island-Ile de la Cité)

This is Point Zero in the square outside of the cathedral.

All distances in France, from Paris, are measured from this point

Outside Architecture of Notre Dame...Jesus is in the middle top picture.
Notice the Apostle holding it's head in the top left picture.

INSIDE:
North Rose Window depicts scenes from the New Testament
Joan of Arch middle top

The ceilings are so tall. It's HUGE! I can't even begin to imagine building it without modern day machinery. I also can't understand how the love of the building went through generations for it to finally be completed. Notre-Dame took over 200 years to build. Simply Amazing!

EXTERIOR:

The flying buttresses are amazing (top right and bottom middle). Notice in the bottom left the "green" guys...Find Viollet-le-Duc himself at the base of the spire among the green apostles and evangelists (visible as you approach the back end of the church). The apostles look outward, blessing the city, while the architect (at top) looks up the spire, marveling at his fine work.

Beautiful Park outside.
I can only imagine how gorgeous it is in the spring once the leaves are on the trees.

More on the walking tour. We found ourselves at the Deportation Site, memorial to the 200,000 French victims of the Nazi concentration camps (1940–1945). Sadly it was closed so we had to come back another day. Also, the Notre Dome Tower closed too. The line was VERY long when we first arrived so that would be for another day too.

It's crazy seeing young guys with machine guns just walking around.
Not use to that site at all (top right)

We hit up the French Quarter after our walking tour...at least what we saw of it before everything closed. Rebecca was so excited we found it. As I had been reading through the tour books I was going to skip it but glad we didn't. The people are so friendly and it was very LIVELY! I loved everyone begging for our business. Rebecca got crepes to share as I fed SP and then we walked around. We got two chicken gyros (wrapped with fries) to eat too and decided after we both barley ate half that we would only get one thing and share it from then on and buy more of something else if we were still hungry. That way we could try more of a variety.

Aunt Becca got to carry SP after I fed her dinner.

Since we didn't have a plan of where to go we played the game of each taking a turn of what street to go down. It was fun until we realized we were getting FAR away from food and wanted to try to get some ice cream. We pulled out our map and started to find our way to the shop but once we were getting close to the METRO we decided the ice cream could wait and bed sounded so much better after all the walking and lack of sleep from the airplane ride over. It was a great choice. I could barley stay awake to just download the pictures I took from the day.