Paris Day 2

Both Abby and I woke up before the alarm on the second day in Paris to a rainy day. It was lovely in my opinion though because I’d always had an image of Paris in the rain. We packed up quickly and left our bags in the lobby of the hotel for the afternoon until it was time to catch our train to Amsterdam.

We got breakfast at a café near our hotel and had what is apparently a classic French breakfast: mini croissants with coffees. Obviously French croissants are awesome.

From breakfast we went to take a look at the famous Opera house. It was incredible. Someday I would really love to see a performance there.

 

After the Opera house we went to the Musee D’Orsay. Good timing too because as we were near the front of the line it started raining harder than it had been before. While we in line we started talking with this group of older women on vacation from the Caribbean and Florida. They were really fun to chat with and made standing in line seem very quick though I’m sure we were in line for at least forty-five minutes.

The interior of the museum is gorgeous. It’s inside an old converted train station and they left some of the original structures. They have a strict “NO PHOTORAPHY” rule which is too bad because some of the marble sculptures rivaled Rodin’s in my opinion

I would have liked to have photos of them or a postcard. Oh well. We continued our game of spot the Eiffel tower. We were able to find it from one gallery. 

I couldn’t resist having Abby take a few photos in the impressionism gallery though. They had some paintings by Renior and Monet that I’d seen in posters all throughout my life that I know are some of my parents favorites. I made Abby break museum rules for you guys, mom and dad. Ha. 

 And I couldn't help myself I had to take a photo from the clock window. That's the Louvre by the way.

When we left the museum we went in search of one: a Longchamp store, because I was considering buying one of the bags – they didn’t have yellow so I didn’t buy one and two: street vendors selling authentic French paninni’s. 

Then we took the metro to a cool mosque in the city to look around. The courtyard of the mosque was really beautiful. There were a lot of gardens and fountains and everything was mosaic it seemed. The floor was this lovely aqua and if gave the impression that there was always a pool of water even though it was dry. We didn’t have much time after we left the mosque until we needed to go back to the hotel to grab our bags and head to the train station but we went to a tea shop and had middle eastern mint tea and also a bakery to pick up an authentic French pastry. I got a Tart Citrion and Abby Chausson de pomme which is essentially a French version of an apple strudel. 

All day we were under the impression that the train tickets we held were from Paris to Amsterdam so we weren’t too worried about time, we already had our tickets. When we got to the station and our specific platform twenty minutes before our train was supposed to leave we realized that we in fact had printed tickets from Amsterdam to Hamberg and not Paris to Amsterdam. Luckily we already had our reservations but it was a bit of a panic to get our tickets printed and get ourselves on the train.

We got on the train with about a minute to spare from its departure time only to find out a few seconds later that the train was delayed fifteen minutes. Both Abby and I had a good laugh at that.