Europe, Part Five: Paris, France

Pardon my brief hiatus. 

[Life was temporarily kicking my behind, but we're back on track now.]

Anyway, it seems like a long time ago now, but on Thursday, we headed to Paris. Jeremy's mom kept Jacob, so it was just Jeremy and I.

While we ended up loving the city, the day did not get off to a good start. Kind of like we enjoyed London, we decided to purchase a bus tour for Paris: WRONG.

Paris is just not the right kind of city for a bus tour. When you're 3 hours into seeing Paris and you're not impressed, something is wrong.

Alas, at some point, we ended up ditching our bus tour, walking around everywhere. While walking, we really got to experience and enjoy Paris.

That's when we fell in love with Paris.

This is the train station where we arrived in Paris from Brussels.

Waiting for the bus... which we seemed to do for quite. a. while.

Louvre

Arc de Triumphe

We ditched our bus tour after it dropped us off at Arc de Triumphe. From here, we walked.

This isn't far from Arc de Triumphe and when we became sure walking wouldn't be a problem: we can see the Eiffel Tower, now let's just walk toward it.

And so we did.

It was an amazing sight.

[You may notice a few pictures that might have been expected here are missing. That's because that event gets its own blog post... tomorrow!]

From there, we took ourselves on a walking tour which I had printed online. It starts at the Louvre and ends at Notre Dame.

I feel like the pictures don't do it justice (maybe because of the dreariness going on), but this is the beautiful Cite Island in the middle of Paris where Notre Dame is located.

On our walk, we found this random bridge with locks everywhere. We had no idea what it meant, but I've since discovered that it's a romantic thing: couples put the lock there basically promising to come back together one day. How sweet!

Then, we got to Notre Dame. It was beautiful. I have pictures of the inside, but I can't even post them - they don't do the place justice.

This is the place in Paris where all distances are measured. 
It's also our feet, right smack dab in the middle of Paris.

Tomorrow: I'm engaged.