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  • Day 32

    First REAL day in Paris!

    June 19, 2022 in France ⋅ ⛅ 68 °F

    In contrast to yesterday, today was absolutely packed with things to do. We started at the Paris Museum of Modern Art, which was fun and had a lot of interesting art, but their main exhibit with their most famous works was closed for some reason today. Afterwards, we went and had a picnic in the Champ de Mars (park) outside of the Eiffel Tower. From there we took a train to the Arc de Triomphe and went to the top and got amazing views of the city. From there we rented bikes through one of those bike share apps (through Uber actually) and had a great ride over that we intended to take to the Louvre, but ended up not being able to park the bikes anywhere near there, so we ended up going to the Île de la Cité, the island on the Seine that has the Notre-Dame cathedral and Sainte-Chapelle. We then crossed to the other side and explored the Latin quarter, then sat outside of the Pantheon for a bit. Then we met up with Lucas and got dinner with him back near the Latin quarter - I was a bit scared but I decided to try beef tartare after doing some research and being assured that it’s safe, hopefully I won’t get food poisoning in the next few days.
    So far the first real day exploring Paris was absolutely amazing and we are loving the city so far! The only real negative is that it is unbelievably expensive compared to Spain and Italy. The language barrier is also very strong and there are not many English speakers around considering it is such a touristy city. However, people are far nicer than I had expected and we have only had positive experiences. We even had a waiter who kept telling us about how much he loved the US and kept rattling off state capitals that he knew - unfortunately he thought that Minneapolis was the capital of Illinois, but props to him for knowing either of those two places exist!
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