That’s right.  I don’t mean a movie, book, or song; I mean the place.  I am reviewing Paris.  I haven’t done a Blind Review for quite a while, so I wanted to end this hiatus with a big one.  

Where do I begin?  Paris is the most densely populated city in Europe.  It is crazy, crowded, and hectic.  People are everywhere you go, tourists are constantly forming lines in front of anything historical.  There are so many things to talk about that I’m going to break this review up into parts.

Things to See:

There are so many things to see in Paris that you can’t actually see them all unless you stay there for a while.  The Louvre alone is so enormous that it would take months to see the whole thing.  Unfortunately, the Louvre will be left out of this review because it was too crowded to get in.  The first day we got there, we saw the Eiffel Tower.  It was nighttime, so it was all lit up.  There were tourists and gypsies surrounding the place, but it the crowd was light enough to walk under and around it it.  Every hour on the hour, the tower blinks with white lights for ten minutes, which is really amazing looking.  (the picture at the top of the post is one i took)  Everyone has seen the Eiffel Tower in a photo at least, so you can pretty much imagine what it looked like.  Before we saw the Eiffel Tower, we walked to Notre Dame before it got dark.  It is an architectural wonder.  Here’s a photo of it next to the Seine River:

It has so many little intricacies that it is purely mind blowing.  This is needs to be on your list of things to see in Paris.

Notre Dame runs along the Seine River, which is a super long river that runs through Paris. We took a boat cruise along it at night, and despite the cold weather and the creepy guy following us around, seeing Paris at night along the river is breathtaking.  You go under famous bridges, see the Lourve, Eiffel Tower, markets that are only up during Christmastime, and many other things.

On the Champs-Elysées, there were a lot of places to shop.  It was so crowded that it was a battle to get all the way to the end.  This was probably the most walking we had all done at one time in Paris.  Most of the time you take the Metro from place to place, but this time we just walked all the way to the Arc de Triomphe.

  To get across the large roundabout, you have to take some steps down to walk under the street.  Once you get out, you can walk all around and under the huge Arc.  I wish we went to it a little earlier in the trip, because by this time we were all super tired.  I think that hurt our enjoyment of it.  Those are just a few of the places to check out in Paris, more to come in Part 2 of the review!

Continue to Part 2