Tuesday night we decided to hang out in Gent and we hung out with a colleague of mine, Tom, and his girlfriend who both live in Gent and showed us an amazing time. Starting with Frijtes (fried food, fries, sausage, chicken etc) we then decided to go to the Jenever bar I took Emma and Jessie to. End of the day we made it back to the hotel around 1 AM and were a bit late waking up and had to call a cab to get us to the train station in time to catch our train to Brussels to meet Hugo and his girlfriend. After the couple hour drive we arrived in Paris and since our hotel was across the street from the Louvre, we walked past their first before renting bikes to head to the Eiffel Tower. We were able to see all of the main sites on Wednesday without spending too much time at any of them. We saw the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Archditriumph, Notre Dame, Moulin Rouge, Elysses de Champs, etc etc. After an amazing dinner we stopped at a place that made fresh crepes and we each had a delicious chocolate crepe.
Caption: Outside the Louvre.
Thursday morning we went to the Eiffel tower to go up to the top – which took ~2 hours at 1 PM on a Thursday but overall totally worth it as we were able to see Paris from an extraordinary view and made sure we got our money’s worth by making a stop at each of the three levels.
Caption: Eiffel Tower is pretty cool, but kind of lame when you realize it is not even as tall as the Dom in Koln...
We then headed to a restaurant for a break to grab a crepe before heading to the Louvre where we only had enough time to see the Mona Lisa, which is incredibly small and anti-climatic because you can not get within 25 feet of it and it is not big enough to really get a good view of it.
Caption: Just want to show the setup, has a whole wall to itself, it is small and you can not get very close.
Overall, even though it is fairly hard to admit, Paris was an incredible city and took me by surprise. The enormous size of it was impressive but it is built more like an American city I feel – bigger streets, large grass malls and parks, extravagant statues and walkways, etc – very beautiful and thought-out city compared to the zero organization Flemish towns!
We are now on our way to London via the high-speed Eurostar train – we paid an extra $16 per person for the ‘Leisure Select Club’ and it was totally worth it! Three rounds of drinks, a small meal and dessert is the best way to arrive in London without a clue of how to get to our hotel :-)!!!!
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