A Stranger in a Strange Land - Thursday

Thursday night I packed up a few last minute things and grabbed Ryan and we walked to the tube station to meet Jessi at her work about 40 minutes away. She had already brought our one humongous super heavy suitcase with her to work so we left straight from there to St. Pancreas station which houses a tube station and Eurostar a highspeed train that travels between England and France. We went through customs and security and boarded our train which was very nice. Jessi had booked us a seat with a table and the train wasn't very busy so we were able to use all four seats around the table. Ryan was a bit cranky as it was getting late so we gave him lots of snacks, watched baby einstein videos on the laptop and played with the brand new dinosaurs and cars daddy had bought him earlier that day. The entire trip took about 3 hours which is short unless you have a cranky baby on board hehe. They had a fire in one of the tunnels earlier this year and that has slowed the trip down, I guess it used to be around 2 hours.

Once we arrived we immediately looked for the taxi stand and ooh'd and ahh'd at all of the signs in french. We both crossed our fingers that everyone in france spoke perfect english and got in the line for a taxi. While in line I noticed a huge man of african descent standing by the line next to a cardboard box that I presumed was his bed. He had clothing that was ripped showing most of his legs and sandles that didn't cover his grotesque feet which looked like they had been frostbitten 100 times. He picked at his ratsnest of hair and mumbled to himself. This was the first of the very poor and invalid that I was to see during my trip.

With a bit of luck and Jessi's carefully prepared map and address sheet we were able to tell the french taxi driver where our hotel was. He seemed to have a bit of a problem with the exact location and yelled at someone on his cell phone in loud thickly accented french for the first quarter of our journey. On the way to our hotel I was looking out the window when I saw a HUGE building that stretched what seemed like a mile. It was a marvel on the outside with amazing stonework. I asked the driver if that was the Louvre. He responded "Oui Monsieur!" Would you like to see?" He then whipped our taxi across 3 lanes of traffic and squeezed into the middle of the Louvre complex. I can't describe how big this museum is so I've added this aerial view i found on the web. It is truely magnificient and we were lucky to get to tour it and see the Mona Lisa but i get ahead of myself!

As we neared our hotel we could see the Eiffel Tower which as we found out has a light show that goes on for 10 minutes on the hour every hour at night. I wanted to get a video of this but wasn't able to so here is one i found on youtube that shows exactly what we saw. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYH2IDQcjTU

We arrived at our hotel and were pleasantly suprised at a really nice clean albeit small room with a very friendly staff. We got an amazing deal on http://www.lastminute.com/ and it was literally less than half the normal price. Exhausted we passed out on our bed with Ryan in between us around midnight and slept through till almost 9 in the morning on Friday.