After a year of flying, I finally had the chance to step foot in the city of romance. Having a 54hrs layover means 2 days to spend in this beautiful city starting on the Boxing Day (26 Dec). I was so excited I started my research about what to do there the moment I receive my roaster.
After some research I decided to follow my friends' suggestion to go for the free walking tour http://www.newparistours.com/ My flying partner for this month is a Korean and we clicked so well so this is one if the rare cases where I hangout with a crew during layover. I hardly hangout with other crews that I'm not familiar with. Had some bad and funny experience. Wanna hear them? Date me for a cup of tea ;)
Anyway, back to Paris and the tour. Due to the miscommunication and confusion given by different parties, we were late for the meeting time by 15mins and the tour left without us. So we had no choice but to do our own walking tour along the banks of the La Seine River.
We started with Notre Dame.
Check out the queue to go in man. We absolutely did not want to wait. So we took a selfie (actually a bunch of them) and moved on.
The weather was pretty gloomy, there was no chance of blue sky at all. Our hands were freezing and even my leather gloves couldn't do the job. Our best friend was the little heat packs I bought from Daiso a year ago. We kept it in our pockets and it became our little warmer.
I kinda liked the feel of the La Seine river. I could imagine how nice it'd be during summer.
As we walked along, we arrived at the famous "Love Lock Bridge" - Pont des Arts.
These were all the locks we could see from the bridge cause they've sealed it to prevent more "locking".
It became a graffitti bridge.
Oh well, we crossed the bridge and kept walking.
That's my flying partner's beautiful back :P
Our next point of interest was none other than The Louvre Museum!
Gosh, what happened to winter being a low season for tourists?
A unique(funny) view at The Louvre - Human Statues doing the same pose :P
I decided to do something different. I, well, decided to kiss the tip instead of hold it. Trust me, I had to try so hard to stop myself from laughing and so did the on lookers. Heeh. Due to the queue, we didn't go in either.
After The Louvre was Jardin des Tuileries.
Finally caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower!
The park was BIG. We got tired of walking so we sat here for a while to enjoy the breeze and scenery. Oh, did I mention, I only slept an hour after an overnight flight before heading out. My flying partner didn't sleep at all. So we were literally 2 zombies walking. What made us stood up and continued walking was when the birds/ducks/seagulls decided to flock and fly above our heads all of a sudden. We had to ran for our lives man! Not interested in getting poop rain eventhough it's made in Paris.
Saw some shops selling these coated apples. Overpriced but so pretty.
We bought some churros from this shop under the ferris wheel and got cheated. We thought the initial price quoted was inclusive of the nutella cause they displayed them together. But we ended up paying 5euros and received plain churros and got informed that we have to pay another 2euros for the nutella. *hmph*
Soon, we found ourselves the Christmas market along Champs des Élysées and boy it felt like we're in wonderland! To bad it was still bright, otherwise it'd be so pretty with all the lights.
CHOCOLATES!
We needed some hot food so this meat pie looked like a pretty good deal. Too oily for my liking tho, but it fulfilled our crave for oink oink. Heeh.
Very few pictures were taken due to the increasingly cold weather. The stretch of Christmas market was LONG but the goods sold were pretty much the same in alternate stores. Some of the main products were chocolates, wine, sausages, cheese, accessories(you can find them in China) and winter clothes such as scarfs and hats(can be found in China for 10% of the price sold as well).
We went from one point to another with the help of the offline Google Maps. I pre-saved the locations I'd like to visit prior to the trip. When we're out without wifi, it still tracks our location and indicates it with a blue dot and with the offline map, we'd know which direction to walk.
See those stars? Those are the locations that I've saved before hand.
The end of Champs des Élysées was some high end shopping malls and Arc de Triomphe. We couldn't drag our tired feet to the bottom of the arc.
Only managed to snap this photo while crossing the road and the auto focus decided to fail on me D:
The difference between Korean and Malaysian or should I say cold country people and tropical country people. She still looked so poise and elegant under the freezing weather while I took every piece of accessory out from my bag to keep warm and look ugly.
Saying goodbye to the crowd and shopping malls, we head towards the Eiffel Tower. It was one of the longest walk ever!
I will never forget how in awe I was the first time I saw it in it's full glory from the La Seine river.
While we were taking photos of each other, the light show came on!
It was SO GORGEOUS!
This was the time we decided that we want to get up that tower regardless the price we have to pay. So we made our way to the feet of the tower.
One word. WOW.
Guess what, the queue was SO LONG it felt like some 800 people were queueing to get tickets to go up! So no, we did not go up at the end D:
We waited for another light show to happen to get a close up view. Man, it's just so pretty.
Because we waited for this round of light show, we got caugh in the rain but it was worth it. This, was our last stop :))
I was super grateful for the auto function of my Sony NEX-5T. It worked perfectly most of the time. It's just impossible to bring my hands out to use the manual functions under such weather.
This day out made me know myself a little more too. I found out that I'm actually a "follower" when I'm with people whom I knew I can trust. This entire day, apart from the time my google maps came to the rescue, I deepended on her for the directions especially in those confusing-smell-like-toilet metros. It feels kinda good to not take the lead once in a while. Heeh.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for day 2 for macarons, ice-skating ring and the night view of The Lourve etc.
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