Day 10, May 21, Saturday, Paris
Today was memorable, I saw the Eiffel Tower, Arc of Triumph, Hotel des invalides, Grand and Petit Palais, Place de Concorde Hotel de Ville and Notre Dame. But there are just too many things to see in Paris, Paris is worth a week's stay.
Luckily, I spent my entire day with a Canadian guy called Jesse. He just randomly picked me up at the table when I was just about to head out. Fortunately he's a very very very nice guy, and he does Martial Arts!! He even goes to National Competition, how cool is that. Well I kinda went to a Martial Arts National Competition too, but that was an embarrasing history, haha. He likes taking photos, too. So we soon became the perfect photo buddies for each other. He loves looking up and doing this silly serious expression, which looked really dumb at first. But somehow I discovered that when I tried to squeeze out a smile for a photo, not to mention suppressing the stupid impulse of doing a V sign, I only looked fifty one times dumber. So now I've adopted Jesse's pose for every picture I take.
As we walked down, across and around the Avenue des Champs Elysees, we came to Seine river and were astounded by its beauty. Paris is like, just go to Seine river in the downtown section, point your camera anywhere and you got a poster card made: it is that nice. Our first destination was Hotel des invalides, a majestic hall built for the "invalides": the disabled French veterans. There were countless weapons, mainly canons, displayed all over the place. Jesse knew about the weapons while I was an idiot. But it was quite a sight. The French mob in the revolution invaded this place and grabbed all the rifles they could find before they headed down to Versailles to chop down Louis XVI's head. The little eglise was beautiful too, it was there where I learnt about the huge organ to be found in every subsequent eglise I've been to.
Then we spent almost the entire afternoon on the Eiffel Tower. I must admit, the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower at a close-up distance, I was literally excited. It looked ten thousand times more magnificent then on the thousands of photos I've seen before. It was just undescribably beautiful. Jesse and moi climbed onto the tower, and when I started going up I felt a little bit of adrenline rush as I was about to go up to a height I've not reached in a long time. There are basically three levels on the Eiffel Tower, the first floor, the second floor and the top. At one corner of the first floor, you could go around the square and they had explanation together with photo directions of every single major sight of Paris. When I went up higher and higher, I took more and more photos. When you got to the top the view of Paris was just simply incredible. There were also a hell lot of tourists crowding the entire place, the real reason why we spent the entire afternoon there, cuz whatever you do, there was always a long queue. I wondered how much revenue Tour Eiffel generates a day.
Then we headed down to the Arc of Triumph, there was a parade going on, apparently some big shots were there or something. We didn't find the entry into Arc of Triumph, parce que it was surrounded by the largest roundabout in the world leading to some a dozen big avenues, including l'avenue des Champs Elysees, where literally 87.5 cars passed before your eyes every second. But it looked very elegant from the distance, though.
And then, Notre Dame. Notre Dame was awesome. The most detailed, exquisite, different and sophisticated gothic cathedrale which combined almost all the elements of the Gothic architecture. It has a very different appeal from all different angles. It killed the rest of the memory I got on my camera. Notre Dame is on an island, when we walked by the waters there were some big and stylish tour boats passing by. Some rowdy soccer fans cheered at them, and the people on the boat echoed. Some other parisians were having a pique-nique right by the river. That's the kind of the "Parisian Life" I wanted to see.
Got back to the hostel at 10 and it was still bright, I decided to kill the pathetic two little beers I still had, so I headed down to the lobby and it happened that I met some really really cool German kids, Chris spoke almost perfect English and he was humorous and witty, Andrei was a charming bad ass that every girl easily fell in love with. Later Jesse and his roommate joined in as well, and we had a long and nice talk about girls and music. It was good times.

leaving skool guoyandao at 5:04 PM [comment]

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