bonjour paris!

after my lovely stay in boston, the last 24 hours have been more than a whirlwind.

i made it to logan with plenty of time to make a couple last-few-minutes-on-the-continent calls, get my wits together, and hop on a plane to paris.

... well, almost straight to paris. we had a bit of a midnight stopover at keflavik airport in iceland. i don't remember much of iceland. i had to go through passport control... the language had lots of weird squiggly letters... i had no idea the conversion of icelandic kroner to dollar, let alone euro... and this was the ceiling in the main area of the airport.


it was pretty cool, for wandering around like a zombie at what felt like 2:30am. oh dear. thankfully, i slept a couple hours on the flight to paris. (after accidentally trying to board an iceland air flight rather than my iceland *express* flight. gah. so picky!)

a few hours later, we were landing in paris. i'm still getting used to traveling again - and kind of scary to feel that "oh yeah, this is me on my own" feeling, so absolutely... but it is going to be a good thing. one of my classmates from my program also came to paris before heading to amsterdam, so he met me at gare du nord - he happens to be staying in my neighborhood, so helped guide me back to my hostel, then we wandered aaaaaaaaall around paris.

ok, not really everywhere. but here's a taste of day 1. keep in mind, i'm running about 5 hours behind (from EST) - so when we started wandering at 3:45pm? i was feeling about 10:45am :)

sacre coeur is right up the hill from my hostel. it was crazybusy - and i unwillingly (unwittingly?) found myself with a friend who made me a friendship bracelet. for "free." well, now i have a friendship bracelet?

my first view of the eiffel tower, from sacre couer. yay!

yup. that building has a band aid. for scale? little pointy thing in the background is the tower. that band aid is like 3 feet across. yup.

ahhh, home. *phew* i have a feeling i won't have to go far to feel a little less homesick :)

i found a ferris wheel! not quite on a pier, but i do love my ferris wheels.
(across the street from the lourve. which i did not enter, but i did stand in the tunnel thing, so *technically* i have been inside... next time, i promise.)

i <3 the seine. that's all.

dad, this one is for you.

then we finally made it to the tower!
(a bit of backstory: i've been waiting to go up this tower since we didn't make it up the one in vegas. alex, we should really do the real tower someday.)
um, so now there will be lots of pictures of/from the tower. get ready!

(i loved this motif. it's like frank lloyd wright got a little french and a little celtic. love it.)

and then it started to be sunset...

looking out to the west, clearly, with a RAINBOW over the city. yup. it was pretty awesome.

so, no, i didn't go to the top - but i DID climb all the 650+ steps up to the middle level, and it was pretty fantastic. until i started to go down, and i forgot how much better i like climbing UP than climbing DOWN. legs got a bit jiggly and maybe a bit of vertigo... but i made it down. and it was so worth it.

and then! we walked west a bit on the way to the metro home... and turned around...

:)

so that was day one in paris! after walking a bzillion miles around the city all afternoon, we found the metro for a meandering ride back to montmarte, found some dinner - croquette "oiseaux" - which i had to try, because wtf does that mean!? (it had an egg on top. was still lovely and scrumptious.) and i made it back home laaaate last night... but it still felt like about 6pm. and crashed.

and now, i have breakfasted on croissant and cafe au lait and it is time for some wandering! notre dame? musee d'orsay? what else shall i find today?