5 jours inoubliables, deuxième part

The second day in the city of lights and love made us worship France for inventing their EU 18 to 26-system even more, because we were on our way to the Hôtel des Invalides where Napoléon took his final rest. Which makes one wonder why exactly, although he was banned by the British after the battle of Waterloo for the remainder of his life to St.Helena, located west of Africa in the southern Atlantic: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/St_Helena-Pos.png, that he rests apparently in a tomb in the middle of Paris. Wikipedia states that Louis Phillipe I asked the British for permission to return Napoleon to his hometown, which is why he's there now for us tourists to look at.

After the "Invalides" Military Museum that surrounds "Le Tombeau de Napoléon", we headed for Paris's landmark and the prettiest of all landmarks in the world: the Eiffel tower.

It takes you (as a youth from 12 to 24 years old) exactly 3,70€ and more than 600 steps(meaning NO lift) to mount the tower up to it's "2e étage" which is located at 115m.
If you should still decide wanting to see the city of lights and love from its topmost point, there's no healthy choice for poor university students; because everybody has to take the lift and no matter what age, it costs you 5,30€ to reach "le sommet" (French for "the peak") at 276m.

Of course the view is very nice up there too, but ultimately, it's only the 150m more...on the 2nd floor, you can see everything already just fine, to be honest (the photos of "Trocadéro" show the minor difference you can observe) ---saves you the money and crushed hands by scared fellow elevator-riders who happen to be your friends, because the thing goes up pretty damn fast and you can see just how fast due to the elevator being made of glass.
From up top, whichever top one chooses, you can make out all of the famous Paris landmarks, although you have to scan for some harder than for others. The Sacre-Coeur on the hill in the north is made out pretty easily due to its shining white facade (once the clouds where gone, of course). It gets more difficult if you want to find Notre Dame or the Arc de Triomphe, due to their rather grey built blending in with the rest of the city's grey house fronts. For good eyes (or cameras with good zoom) you can even see "la pyramide" at the Louvre.


Once down the elevator and down the stairs again, we walked over to "Trocadéro", a square, garden, and metro station famous for being the place to take a picture with the iconic tower we'd jsut been on top of.
Next up on our sightseeing was the Arc de Triomphe, another one in the French's marvelous program of letting under 26-year-olds get in free at the top Paris attractions.
More pictures of the Eiffel tower taken, we walked down the Champs-Elysées, more or less accurately singing and humming the folk song about this famous street and making our way back to our couchsurfing home and our hostess, Loica, who would take us out to dinner in Montmatre that evening.

We ate in a very nice restaurant and had "salades géantes" (giant salads, and meaning it) which nobody could finish in the end, walked up the steps to Sacre Coeur and just in time found a spot to glimpse the Eiffel tower in "full bloom" as I call it. What I mean are the spectacular 10 minutes at each full hour when the tower is not only lit up in gold, but sparkles in silver.


With this wonderful sight still in our eyes, we went back to bed to rest for the peak of our trip the next day: DISNEYLAND!

tobecontinued...