< previous
next >
Day 5: May 29, 2024
We woke up to rainy skies. This morning we had a city sightseeing tour in a bus - because of the coming Olympic Games there is still a lot of building and infrastructure work going on in Paris, and this has made the usual traffic chaos even worse.We saw some of the main sights from the bus, but others were impossible to get to. On the last night of our tour we will be returning to Paris, and we will be taking a boat ride on the River Seine, when we'll see a lot more of the sights without traffic!
After the bus tour we went to The Galeries Lafayette department store, which was built at the end of the 19th century, and which has an amazing stained glass dome, which now has a glass walkway you can walk out on to, to stand on the middle of the dome. There are a maximum of 8 people allowed on at one time, so we had booked two slots for our group, and most people enjoyed doing this. Those of us who get vertigo and could not be dragged screaming onto the walkway took photos from the side!
Afterwards we went to the Fragonared perfume museum to find out how perfume is made and to buy some if we wanted to.
Next we travelled by métro (the Paris subway) to the area of the Louvre art gallery, where we had a short break for lunch, then went to stand in line to get throught the security to get into the Louvre. Even though we had timed tickets (for 2pm), it took us 90 minutes to get into the gallery (the Paris choaos strikes again!), but we did eventually get in and went to see the Mona Lisa.
We had a meeting place after the Louvre visit, but unfortunately some people were shown to the wrong exit door, and it took us some time to locate them, so we were late for dinner, but luckily we were still able to eat.
The group had planned to visit the Eiffel Tower this evening, but it was pouring with rain, and we would have had to line up for tickets outside, so I was decided to visit the huge shopping mall at Les Halles instead, which everyone enjoyed. We will try to visit the Eiffel Tower when we come back to Paris on Sunday.