Breakfast as you would expect in France consisted of baguettes, cheese, ham and some other goodies. After which Connor, Fabian & myself made our way to the Metro and headed to the Notre Dame Cathedral. Negotiating the Metro here was rather easy and we were at our destination station within just a few minutes. Upon exiting the station I noticed a carrousel sitting outside the metro, I recognised it from a picture of places I had been looking up to visit earlier. It wasn't actually the carrousel that I wanted to see, but the building that was just behind it, Hotel de Ville. Hotel de Ville is essentially their city hall, housing the city administration. While we didn't go inside I thought the building from outside was just beautiful, originally constructed in 1357, it was torn down in 1533 after King Francis I decided to make a city hall that would be worthy of Paris, in 1628 it was finally finished under the reign of Louis XIII. Reconstruction began once again on the building in 1873 after a fire in 1871 engulfed the building in flames and left basically just a stone shell. The reconstruction was finally finished in 1892. From there we moved onto the Notre Dame Cathedral which is one of the largest and well known churches in the world, made more well known by the book by Victor Hugo "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". Original construction started in 1163 under the reign of Louis VII and over the next 182 years it underwent a number of upgrades/modifications until it was completed in 1345. The stain glass windows were just beautiful, however I'm not sure how much of them are original, as in the 1790's the cathedral was desecrated during the radical phase of the French Revolution, so a lot of the religious imagery was destroyed. I tried to get some photos of the stain glassed windows, but I'm sure the colour is not going to be as amazing as it was in person. We did notice some tourists just completely ignore any of the rules, they stepped passed a clearly marked off area and walk up to where the priest were praying and were talking to each other (no talking in there allowed) and taking pictures, when the security guy came up, they just looked as if like they didn't realise, they were just being rude and disrespectful in my opinion, one of these guys also happened to push in front of us in the line into the building. After leaving there, we made our way by foot to Hotel des Invalides. We decided to walk instead of taking the metro as it was only about 20 minutes difference in travel time and we were able to take a look at stuff along the way. I couldn't help but think it looked like a scene from the computer game Assassins Creed, only because of the architecture of the buildings, we didn't have people in robes or hoodies running around with knifes or pistols tucked away up their sleeves. We arrived at Hotel des Invalides, while it is now largely known as the military museum of France, it is also partly a hospital and retirement home for war veterans which was its original purpose when Louis XIV ordered the construction in 1670. Construction began in 1671, the story we were told is that one day Louis XIV was having a party and noticed some homeless people outside wearing solider uniforms, in disgust he went out and said how dare you wear the uniform thinking they were just homeless people, they explained that they were former military who had returned from the war, but couldn't afford housing, he then decided that the old and unwell soldiers needed somewhere to live. As I mentioned building is a military museum and we spent a lot of time looking though the WWI and WWII exhibitions. A lot of the collection was uniforms of different styles and countries, but obviously contained lots or weapons as well, including an A bomb (replica I assume), rocket, a old military barricade and even an old tank, which some how I didn't notice, despite walking right past it. I must be easily distracted... Ohh look a bunny. After leaving that exhibition we made our way to Napoleon's tomb which is actually housed in Dôme des Invalides, which was right next to the main building we were in. Walking in the main doors you find a large round opening, upon approaching this you look down and see the sarcophagus of Napoleon Bonaparte, this is actually made up of 6 sarcophagus's put inside each other like Russian dolls, the outside one is made of red quartzite and resting on a green granite base, although I'm not sure if the others are also made of the red quartzite or not. We were advised that the reason he is encased in some many is to prevent him from getting out again. The sarcophagus is also seated in a spot so you are never looking upon him from the same level, you are either look down to him (from the round opening) as if you were bowing to him, or looking up at him from below the sarcophagus. Now after looking down at the coffin I then took a look up to the ceiling. Wow, the ceiling was all painted with beautiful paintings on it. I later found that what I was looking at was actually a second version of the same painting, the original one is actually above the same image, apparently when it was painted on the top of the ceiling it was on the top of the dome and the King at the time said it was too far away to see it, he asked if they could lower the entire Dome so it could be seen better, instead of doing that, they decided to build another ceiling lower down and repaint it all again. The tomb also houses a number of Napoleon's family and several of his officers that served under him. We then made our way back to the museum to take a look at the ancient armoury and artillery, we had only about an hour free so we rushed though this section, which is a shame as looking at the pistols and swords they had on display was a site to see, something that needed more than an hour to really appreciate. The detail and craftsmanship on the armour, swords and pistols was just astonishing, looking at them it was hard to believe that someone would spend so much time doing to just fine detailed work on something that could be used by someone in war just once and never used again should they die in battle. Connor, Fabian and myself then dashed off toward the Eiffel Tower so we would meet up with some of the others from another Topdeck group and head out on a bike tour of the city. At this stage it had just started to rain which was not good timing at all. We grabbed our bikes and made our way though the city in the rain, covering off most of the places we had already seen the night before, however it was nice to actually be outside (despite the rain) dodging the traffic and get a bit closer to some of the monuments, we also finished off the bike ride by biking down the river before heading back to the bike tour office. After the bike tour we were pretty drenched and covered in mud from the puddles we rode through, after making our way to the train station and finally figuring out how to purchase the ticket (this station was a bit different to the other station) we jumped on the train and made our way on to the next station, after 3 or 4 stops, I realised we had gotten on the train in the wrong direction, totally my fault, so we quickly jumped off and onto the correct train. As we approached the original train station which we had just got on at Fabian pointed out we wouldn't have enough time now to get back to our hostel and change, so instead we decided to make our way to the Eiffel tower and get a view from there before we ran out of time completely. We got to the Eiffel Tower and made our way to the elevator to the second level, we didn't have enough time to get to the top nor to take any stairs, when we arrived at the security check point Fabian got though and all of a sudden the security lady started going off at one of the other security guards, after about 5 to 10 minutes of arguing, Fabian was finally able to proceed on and then I was able to go through, while they were still arguing. We got to the second level and took in the amazing view from the tower, looking out across the city was amazing, seeing all these white coloured buildings everywhere and being able to spot some of the sights we had been over the day was brilliant. After completing our visit to the tower we got our way down as fast as we could, unfortunately this was not the fastest trip due to speed of the elevator and the fact it had to go down and up again before we were able to get on. We headed back to our meeting point before enjoying a delicious evening Picnic in the park in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The picnic had a number of things to enjoy, like a cheeseboard of food, some delicious deserts, some chicken and we even got to try frog legs... Frog legs are much easier to explain the taste of than snails, essentially there is no taste to them apart from the herbs they are cooked in, they do have the texture of Chicken, but if they hadn't been clocked in basil or some kind of seasoning, I think they would be tasteless. We proceeded on from there to a Cabaret show "Paradis Latin Cabaret", I won't go into detail to much, but wow, beautiful woman, can't say which one is the best as there were just so many, there costumes were brilliant, or should I say lack there of. The girls on our tour had plenty to enjoy as well with ripped men doing acrobatics and dancing around the stage as well. Connor was singled out at the start of the show by a couple of the men from the performance, the MC and one dressed up as a Transexual. After the show we headed back to the hostel by the metro, attempting to play, don't hold or touch anything while the metro zoomed down the tracks, not the easiest when the train rocks from side to side and stops regularly. Once back at the hostel some of us popped down to the bar inside and had some drinks before heading off to bed at about 2am.