Part Four: Paris, France

Paris. What can I say? I really liked Brussels, Bruges, and especially Amsterdam, but...there's something about Paris. Until I arrived there I'd been travelling solo, and though I met lots of interesting people this way, I was quite excited to meet up with Teri (who also blogged about our trip, here and here) and her cousin Panagiotis.

On our first afternoon Panagiotis, our skilled tour guide, drove us around the entire city. What an introduction to Paris! We basically saw all the famous sights in that first night. Through the car window:



We stopped at a park. My memory fails me; this was probably Place du Luxembourg or the Jardin des Tuileries:



Soteria & Panagiotis:



Evening was falling...





Not a great angle, but an example of some of the gorgeous apartment buildings in Paris. How much would I love to have such a balcony, with the black iron railing, overlooking a Parisian park? Well, a lot.



We had dinner at Café Parisiann, which turned out, to our disappointment, to specialize in American-style food. I guess we should have been tipped off by the name. We redeemed ourselves, however, by going for a chocolat at Les Deux Magots, a café famous for the patronage of the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Hemingway, and Picasso. We sat on the terrasse and watched what was happening on St. Germain.



That night we sampled a couple Paris clubs in the area of La Bastille.



The next day we took a tour on one of the bateaux-mouches, tour boats that go along La Seine. We had one of the many views of the Eiffel Tower that were to come:





Later that day, L'Arc du Triomphe:



And the Champs-Elysée:



After lots of walking, we stopped to refuel:



Back on the street, things looked pretty in the twilight:









Lido!



We didn't actually go to Lido, but to a cinema next door where we saw Lemming, a David Lynch-esque French film. When we came back outside after the movie, there was a street party in progress. Apparently someone had won a soccer game:



Our taxi driver on the way home to Montparnasse was impressed with Panayiotis' multilingualness (English, French, and Greek); he turned out to be a Greek in Paris too.

To be continued...