Last Day in Paris

Today (Saturday 4-12-08) was our last day in Paris. We had such a wonderful time.....don't want it to end. Today, we spent most of the day walking around. I also was able to get Joe to go the Lafayette Galleries (Europe's largest department store). It reminded me of Macy's in NYC.....lots of crowds....not a place you can really do any serious shopping. The store was next to the Opera house, but we only took a photo. We didn't feel like going to any museums today....just wanted to walk around and take in all the beautiful views one more time.

This area was near a restaurant called Le Grand Colbert, where Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson had dinner towards the end of the movie "Somethings Got to Give". We were surprised to see several posters of the movie in the window....seemed out of place and made it look like a tourist trap (which I guess it now is), but it still seemed like a nice restaurant.

Other photos featured here are of a grocery store we frequented for water (Le Marche Franprix) and a sign of Avenue Mac Mahon....Joe took a picture in honor of Mike.

Some other thoughts on Paris.....we were surprised how easy we were able to get around without speaking French and despite what you always hear about the French, everyone was very nice, and even if they didn't speak English well....they knew more English than we knew French and we were able to get by.

We also really liked the metro. Other than walking, it was our primary means of transportation. We're happy to say we didn't take a cab once (only for the airport). It's amazing how many stops there are....come to think of it, I didn't notice any express train options, so perhaps a commute can be long. The frequency of trains was also impressive....they have a timer on each platform to display how many minutes until the next two trains...it seemed that a train came every 2 minutes, so if it was crowded we just waited for the next one.

We got a good amount of exercise underground too. When we had to change trains underground, there was often quite a long walk to get to our next train....there were times when we rounded a corner only to find more stairs.....lots of stairs. Overall though, we found the metro easy to navigate and it was always amazing that when you got out of the metro, you were often immediately at your destination.