My Trip to Paris - January 14-19, 2004 PAGE THREE January
16, 2004 I already had a text message waiting from Dusty at 8am to meet him downstairs. Obviously he didn't want to wait so he bolted for Paris. Me, 5 hours later, showered, got dressed and headed out the door to Paris. I had a couple of stops to make and I needed to get going. Did I say Paris was COOOOOOOOOLD?! I walked the block down to the Metro stop and got an all day pass for 5 euro! That basically allowed me to take any train in zone 1 and 2, which is basically all of Paris. I can't tell you what a great deal that was. This was my first real day on the metro so I grabbed a map and started studying. It's an amazingly simple system that you can pick up in a few hours. On the ride there I got an serenade from an accordian player and a puppet show (which was GREAT!!). Woo! Nothing like inexpensive entertainment while you are waiting on the metro. Of course, I like to people watch so that's entertainment enough for me. My first stop was Bastille. I wanted to take a few pictures and then head to the FNAC store to pick up a few CD's and my concert ticket. Both the Bastille and the FNAC store were right at the Metro stop so that made things very easy. Paris was bustling on Friday and there were motorcycles parked everywhere! It's neat to see all the European motorcycles and how they can park just about anywhere they want to! Makes me wish we had that in the US! After I stopped to take a few pics and shop at the FNAC store, I headed back down to the Metro and took the RER to The Eiffel Tower. That was a fun stop and one that I took a lot of pictures of as you can tell from the number of photos of the tower. Mark called shortly after I arrived and within a 1/2 hour he met me in front of the Eiffel Tower right next to the Police bus. Interesting all the Police around the tower. They were in force. Mark and I took a few pics of each other in front of the tower. Then we headed just north of the tower to the Military Academy and the Peace Monument. It started raining so we bolted to the Metro and headed back to the hotel. There Mark got his room for the night and we headed to Porte de Pantin to check out Le Zénith. Le Zénith was where Alizée's concert was, the last of tour. We had a friend, Ron, coming in from Pittsburg who was bound and determined to stake out a spot in line at midnight but we found out he couldn't do that. So around 8pm, Mark, Dusty and Jarod (A Dutch gent!) headed in to town around 9pm and got dinner at a really nice little Café. I had roast duck and potatoes. Man the food is great in Paris! After dinner, we headed to the Café de la Musique. It was a very nice but expensive bar right next to le Zenith where we met a few other friends and pounded more beer. We had a really cool waiter named William. We took a picture with him the last night in Paris. Around 2 am we head back to the hotel to find Ron. When we got there we found out he had headed to le Zénith to camp out but the guards sent him to the hotel. We found him and Dusty on the walk back to the hotel. We told everyone to hit the sack and we'd see them early in the AM at lke Zénith. |
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