Paris

Sam and I left alpine air for the bright lights of Paris and were excited about touring the French capital.
Paris is a beautiful city, but more beautiful from afar than up close.
The architecture and main tourist sites, like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, are stunning.
But to be honest, the streets in Paris are quite dirty and smell like piss. It seems that Parisians would rather throw trash on the ground than put it in a trashcan and urinate under a bridge or side street than find a toilet.
Despite the lack of cleanliness of the city, we really enjoyed our five nights in Paris.
We chose a hotel pretty close to the Gare de Nord train station and the Montmartre district in Paris, which turned out to be really good decisions.
Montmartre, like our tour guide said during our free walking tour, is almost like its own little village in the city of nine million. There is little traffic on the winding roads in the area, so walking isn’t a chore at all.
There are also a variety of reasonably priced restaurants in Montmartre, so we never had a problem choosing where to eat.
We only overpaid once for a meal, and that was in a place a couple of doors down from the Moulin Rouge.
Sam and I picked this joint because we were desperate to find somewhere to watch the final match of the World Cup.
The day before we decided to go to an Australian bar close by, but when we arrived there about an hour for the game started, we realized that they didn’t serve dinner, only drinks.
So we chose the place by the Moulin Rouge and ended up paying nearly 11 bucks for a pint of beer. Our bill at the end of the night was around $100 for drinks and dinner, and although the atmosphere was superb, the bill was outrageous.
It took us another three dinners to reach $100, which just goes to show you that you’ll pay top dollar for food and beverages if you decided to eat next to main tourist sites.
Eating and drinking weren’t our only activities in Paris, of course.
We toured the palace at Versailles, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, a museum called the Orangerie that housed paintings by Claude Monet and other Impressionist painters and a Salvador Dali museum in Montmartre.
We also walked under the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs Elysees.
Our favorite museum was the Dali museum because it was the most different from any museum that we’ve ever been, too.
We didn’t know before walking into the museum that Dali was a sculptor as well as an artist.
The Dali museum housed several of his sculptures and some lesser-known paintings. In all, there were more than 300 pieces at the museum, definitely worth the $11.60 we paid to get in.
The painting sets we liked the best were Dali’s take on different stories from the Bible, his depiction of Alice in Wonderland and his interpretation of the legend Tristan and Isolde.
The art in the Louvre and the Orangerie was impressive, but Dali’s work was much more interesting for Sam and me.
We also saw our first celebrity in Paris, Karl Lagerfeld, a famous fashion designer for Chanel.
We saw him outside of a bookstore and weren’t sure who he was at all. Several people around us were taking pictures, so Sam snapped a few as well. Once he took off in his Bentley, we asked a guy next to us who he was. In a flamboyant English accent he replied that it was Karl Lagerfeld, of course.
After five nights in Paris, Sam and I were ready for the less touristy and final destination on our European Tour, Bruges, Belgium.