PARIS! FRANCE! Part I!

Oh, Internets! France is so French; French and fabulous--the art, the history, the architecture, the macaroons. Le sigh.

Being there was a dream come true and so much of what I had dreamed was really true: there are cafes everywhere (on every corner like Starbucks here in Seattle, only in France it’s charming), Sundays are all about going to mass and then heading to one of the many public gardens or parks with your family, people honestly wear scarves and blue and white striped shirts, you can’t walk down the street without seeing someone with a baguette in hand (or in a lot of cases in the basket of their bicycle), mopeds and scooters are the preferred mode of transportation, and the wine, chocolate and pastries are even better than they say. Oh, and I think everyone smokes, and I never thought I'd say this, but they smoke in such an elegantly French way, even the teenagers. And you want to say, "Kids, stop sucking on the cancer stick," but they're just being French, they can't help it. Kind of like the North American tourists who don't know any French can't help the fact that they think the best way to translate English into French is by saying their English phrases louder and slower, "DO. YOU. HAVE. ANY. BREAD?"... "BREAD?"... "BREAD?" Maybe the French are smoking just to calm their nerves after being yelled at by tourists all day long.

How about we jump in to LMNT’s adventure in PARIS! FRANCE!?

The objective of the adventure: to just *be* in Paris--no pressure. To do whatever I want, whenever I want, looking cute, and not waste any of my precious time waiting in line for a tourist trap (more on this later), unless it was whatever I wanted to do at that point in time.

Work wrapped up on Friday afternoon and I arrived with a handful of colleagues in PARIS! FRANCE! The rest of the weekend was going to be about me achieving my objective alone, but Friday I was completely down with kicking off my adventure by playing power tourist with coworkers. As good little power tourists do we hopped on the Metro and went straight to the Arc d'Triomphe. And can I just say that when you climb the stairs from that station. BAM! There it is!

We walked our way down the Champs-Elysees, through Place de la Concorde and le Jardin des Tuileries, outside of the Louvre, along the Seine to Notre Dame where we happened upon the FESTIVAL OF BREAD! and finally stumbled our way down a quaint little alley into a nice little spot for dinner. 

After dinner we took the Metro back to our area of town, which was quite near the Eiffel Tower. The French do a lot of things really well: architecture, art, pastries, but perhaps the most lovely is the lighting of their monuments; the Eiffel Tower is no exception.

We made our way back to the hotel and I crashed. The next two days were going to be full of solo adventure, I needed to rest up in preparation for PARIS! FRANCE! Part II! The part where I run, eat, drink, cry a little, and fall in love with the city.