We woke up early but slowly this morning at about 5:30am. It's Saturday, but I have a feeling we will quickly lose track of weekdays vs weekends and in this new life of leisure it's unimportant! The streets were lovely and quiet with the beginnings of a perfect clear day, so around 8am we jumped on the metro to the Eiffel Tower.

We've mastered the metro now, not that it's hard to do! Getting around is so easy and we are getting great value out of our daily passes. The trains come every 2 minutes and over the weekend we are able to get cheap Juenes (youth) passes that get us all over Paris for about 7 euro per day (unless you manage to select the wrong zones, realise your mistake only by head butting the gates/each other trying to enter the station, and then have to repurchase a new zone 1-3 ticket to replace your useless zone 3-5 ticket.Luckily we didn't do that because we have totally mastered the metro, like I said. Ahem.)

We had heard it's best to pre-book tickets and/or arrive early at the Eiffel tower to avoid the massive queues, however Gem looked this up on Friday night and found that due to an 'incident', only one lift is working throughout June and there are no pre-booked tickets left for sale. So we arrived at the tower with little hope that we would manage to get up it, even more so when we saw the long winding queue that had already formed. We decided to give it a go regardless and after waiting in the line for almost an hour until just before the 9:30am opening time, we discovered a second, shorter line for the stairs rather than the single working elevator. We switched across and to our delight we were through within minutes and climbing the stairs to the second floor.

Tell you what, if I could do that climb every day I'd be a machine.It's apparently about 43 floors - over 650 steps - and we had major jelly legs by the time we reached the second floor. But the view was definitely worth it and it is much more satisfying to say that we climbed the Eiffel tower! Looking down we could see the lines had now tripled so our timing was perfect and we were very happy that we had waited it out.

After climbing back down, we wandered through the parkland, sat in the sunshine and ate our packed lunch. Gemma with a 'gah' followed up her run in with a pole at the airport (bye guys, see you, wave wave, bam) with klutz moment number 3 (yes, there is a list :-P) , and ripped a chunk out of her toe on the pathway and bled everywhere...ouch! We walked/limped across the Siene river to have a quick look at the Palace de Chaillot and to buy a museum pass for 39 euro each, which gives us free entry across 2 days to a pretty long list of museums and sights.

By now it was a beautiful 25 degrees and Gem and I had to do a costume change from jeans to shorts before our next stop, the Arc de Triomphe. Because we are clearly suckers for punishment and because it was now free with our pass, we climbed this too - another 103m/280ish stairs - and then followed through with a stroll down the Champs Élysées. We window shopped stores like Cartier, Louis Vuitton and the Mercedes showroom before stopping for a beer in a side alley pub (quite expensive because of the area, but oh so satisfying), and then hopped on the metro to the Louvre.

Well, wow. I'd heard that this place was massive but it's not until you are there that you can really comprehend just how big it is. Friggen HUGE! If we were art buffs we could have kissed the rest of our Paris days goodbye and handed them straight over to the Louvre. However after locating Mona Lisa and a couple of hours browsing, the boys were pretty over it and I was starting to whine about being hungry. The paintings were beautiful,old and intricate but the themes became a little repetitive (baby Jesus, crucified Jesus, and lots of boobs). We did see an exhibition of Napoleon's apartments which Mark loved, and I really enjoyed the beautiful architecture of the Louvre itself and the grounds. It could have been because we were tired, but I felt a couple hours was definitely enough.

We were going to try to fit in the Notre Dame today, but it was getting late and I didn't want to rush it just for the sake of squeezing it in to our 2 free days. Tomorrow we will go to the Palace of Versailles, and then see Notre Dame on the way home if there is time.

We arrived back at the apartment at 4pm and ate/showered, then passed out for hours! I think we are still adjusting to the time difference. It's 10pm now and I'm about to attempt to wake everyone up (heh heh..) as it's about time we had a few beers to celebrate the beginning of our trip!

Salut!

Liss xox