Paris - day 2

Today's itinerary includes Notre Dame cathedral, St Chapelle church, and the Louvre museum. Now with an itinerary like that, you would think we'd be up and out pretty early, wouldn't you? Well we briefly woke up around 4:30 but then fell asleep again and slept in until 9am! Thank you blackout curtains for being so effective ;-)  After getting up and ready and having a bite of breakfast, we finally left the hotel around 10:30. We walked over to Notre Dame and immediately got in line for the Tower. We waited just over an hour to get in, because they limit the number of people going at one time to prevent a big crowd up there at the same time. We appreciated that and didn't mind waiting. We had a nice conversation with a Canadian lady and her daughter while we waited.

Once up the tower (300+ tight spiral steps) we had a panoramic view of Paris and could see the Eiffel Tower and Sacre Coeur. After some pictures, we climbed down the other set of stairs and went into the cathedral. They have a crown of thorns that is supposed to be the original that Jesus was forced to wear before His crucifixion. Is it truly the one? Who knows? They bring it out once a month for viewing but not while we were there. After taking some pictures outside the cathedral, we headed to St Chapelle via the flower market. I was expecting something like an open-air fresh cut flower market, similar to the one we saw in Amsterdam. The flower market here was just a group of wooden buildings with live plants for sale. Not quite what I expected.

People say you should go to St Chapelle for the stained glass and it was a  bright sunny day, so the glass was definitely lit up. The glass is really all there is to see here, so we spent only about 15 minutes.  They have some pretty strict security on the way in because there are also government courts in the same complex and we saw several judges coming out in their robes.

The Louvre is huge! I know everyone says that, but it really is so large that I had a short list of things (6)  that I really wanted to see. Even with a map we still got turned around a couple of times as well as getting distracted by things we would see in other rooms. We finally finished after 6pm and had barely scratched the surface despite having been there for over 3 hours. We did see the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, and Code of Hammurabi among others.

Tomorrow: the Musee D'Orsay, Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe!