Paris DAY 2!

The nice thing about moving 6 time zones is that it lets you sleep a whole night-and-a-half at once in order to get adjusted.

The bad thing about moving 6 time zones is that your body says "I dont THINK so, honey" and wakes me up at 3 AM!!!

So I woke up at 3 am and basically sat in bed until 9:30 when Sam arrived. We went and got breakfast (chocolate croissant and a cappuccino - delic) then moved our luggage to the hotel we got together in the Latin Quarter.

After wandering for a few hours around the St Germain / St Michel area we made our way up to the Isle de la Cite - the small island in the middle of the Seine were the Parisii people first inhabited the area a few thousand years ago. Now it is full of tourist shops. Yay progress!

The Notre Dame was pretty nice, though I am still "cathedraled-out" after seeing more than a dozen in Spain last year. The weirdest thing was wooden columns with french-style covering (pastel fleur de lis) that didnt QUITE fit in with the gothic stoneware. Worth going to visit, though, because the area was nice and admission to the general areas was free.

We then walked over to the Marais area on the right bank, an area described as "gay," "jewish," and "chic" - all at once. One building there reminded both of us of a special structure in Washington DC... brownie points to any of you dear readers who recognize it.

We headed out to Happy Hour (yes, they have Happy Hour here... of course, the "h" is not pronounced) at a VERY cute wine bar on the Seine, where one of the waitresses started playing jazz piano after a few minutes. =awesome. it was such an adorable atmosphere, with only 5-6 tables and 5 feet of bar space. I felt quite parisian, minus being UBER awkward trying to order anything.


(WARNING: Juliet, DONT READ THIS PART)
Finally around 9:30pm (we are in Paris, after all) we sat down to dinner. I decided to go wild and get tartare de boef... I was expecting the raw cubed beef in a mayonaise-type sauce that I've seen in the states. Instead it was a giant patty of raw ground beef with an egg yolk on top. Like woah. My vegan sister Juliet MIGHT not approve...

(OK JULIET YOU CAN READ NOW!)

Paris is kinda cool, I'll admit.