Paris: AMAZING food, fun times and the French

This past weekend Kevin and I traveled to Paris for his 21st birthday. What a way to celebrate! We met up with our friends from San Diego, Janice and Angela.
We took the bus to London and then the Eurostar all the way to Paris. This was a much quicker than the mix of planes, trains, buses, and metros that usually take. We arrived into Paris early Saturday morning and it was dark, cloudy and pouring rain. Then we took the metro to our hotel and by that time it was sunny, warm, and blue skies. God is watching out for us, even in the weather.

So I've learned that Paris is a huge city which has its sites spread out through the city compared to London where most sites are in a few, central locations. This trip was the trip of metros for sure. Good thing the student day pass was only 3.40 euro.

We ate crepes and chocolate croissants straight away, I mean we do have our priorities. I'll post about the food in Paris on Salt & Spatula.

Then we headed to the Louvre, one of the largest and most visited museums in the world.

We asked our professor in Canterbury what to see specifically and she said that we needed at least 5 days to see the Greek art. Oh boy. Kevin and I were also really excited to see the Egyptian art; there were a lot of pieces which we learned about last year. To put the museum into perspective, we saw the King Tut Exhibition at the De Young in San Francisco which had about 100 pieces and it took us a good 2 hours. The Louvre has 50,000 pieces alone from just Egypt, we might have been there for weeks. 
We were able to get into the museum for free because we were students and residents of 
Europe. Here's to being English...sort of. 
By our professor's recommendation, we saw the winged Nike of Samothrace.

Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is there.Here is some pictures to show contrast. There is a painting over 20 times the size and people are ignoring it for the most part.

Turn around and there is a GIANT wall with the Mona Lisa and hundreds of people taking pictures with her. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I did of course.

The Louvre was intimidating yet so fascinating at the same time. They had pieces from all over the world, 380,000 in total. I counted every single one...just kidding. The building itself is beautiful as it used to be a fortress in the 1100's.

After the Louvre, we went to Chez Janou which we found was a great French bistro hidden away from the tourists. It took awhile to find it but it was easily the best food I've had since I've landed in Europe. Ordering was a fun challenge because we all didn't know French at all. I had the magret de canard aux baies de cassis. All I knew that it was duck and that was all I needed to know. It was a seared duck breast over sauteed potatoes, and mushrooms in a rosemary, thyme and garlic sauce. I couldn't stop talking and thinking about it the whole trip. It was that good.
After a great dinner, we sat under the sparkling Effiel Tower drinking dessert wine and eating chocolate. The perfect way to celebrate Kevin's Birthday.

The next morning we traveled to Montmartre which is a hill overlooking Paris.

Then we went to the world's largest antique and flea market called Marche de Puces. It was amazing. They had books from the 1700's, art from ancient Greece and Egypt, old postcards and pictures, antique clothes and buttons. It's probably good that most things were too expensive for me, otherwise would have had to bring another bag.
Then we got falafels at L'as du Falafel which were written about on practically every food blog about Paris. Surprising, because falafels aren't French, they're middle eastern.  The long long line was well worth it. The fried chickpea rounds were served in pita with grilled eggplant, tomatoes, pickled cabbage and cucumbers wrapped in a pitta pocket topped with a tahini based sauce.

We were recommended by my friend, Christine, to get Amarino Gelato. It was SO good. Perfect in every way. They put the different flavors in the shape of flower petals, pure genius.

After gelato, we saw the Arc di Triomph.

The next day, Janice and Angela had to leave early in the morning so Kev and I had Paris to explore on our own.We went to Saint Chapelle, a gothic chapel with 15 foot stained glass windows built by King Louis IX in 1239. Each of the windows features scenes from the books of the Bible. 

Then we walked to the park by the Effiel tower.

Then we went to Laduree, the birthplace of French macarons. I got a lemon macaron, it was light, crispy, slightly chewy and packed a lemon punch. 

We had some time to kill so we wandered around and found the opera  house, and the Jardin de Tuileries.

Soon, it was time to hop on the Eurostar and travel through the chunnel back to England. This was such a great trip. It was good to see Janice and Angela again. Paris is such a culture rich city full of great food, amazing sites, and a really great history.