Paris Part 3 (Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysees)

So let's continue this Paris business. After having (extensively) toured the Centre Pompidou, we decided to be tourists and go visit the Arc de Triomphe. We had both already been there, but the last time each of us were there it was a) summer and b) daytime.

So, one metro trip later...
Bam! Sorry the picture is blurry, I didn't really want to stop and be a tourist. What's cool about this picture, though, is that it's exactly what you see when you come out of the metro station that's by this place...talk about an impressive sight to see while coming up some filthy stairs.

If you want to, you can pay a small fee to go on top of the Arc...Alex and I had both already done it, but again...it was summer and it was daytime so...


...to get up to the top you must climb a never-ending spiral staircase (okay, so it's something around 300 steps, but it feels a little eternal). Inside there was a museum...


...that we totally took seriously (pictured above is a cast of one of the sculptures on the side of the arc...and Alex). Anyway, despite the epic trek up the stairs, the view from the top was totally worth it...it looked a little something like this:

looking toward l'Arche de la Defense

looking in the opposite direction (I'm not sure what this direction is called)

looking toward the Eiffel tower

zooming in on the Eiffel Tower and taking a blurry (but awesome) picture

looking down

To explain this last picture, the Arc de Triomphe is at the very center of the GIANT roundabout at the end of the Champs-Elysees (that super-famous avenue in Paris). Now you might wonder, how did Erica get across what clearly seems to be at least ten lanes of traffic? Simple, I said a little prayer and ran. Joking! There's a staircase that leads into a tunnel that goes under that giant traffic mess, so you're not constantly seeing pancaked tourists in the roundabout. I probably could have stood for hours and just watched the traffic circulate...that's what I did the last time I was there. For example, if you look at the traffic, all of the cars are going the same direction except for two of them, which appear to be trying to traverse the automobile river (seriously, find them). What do you do in a situation like that? The last time I was there, I saw a tiny car nearly crushed between two buses...check out this video that someone took from a tour bus in the roundabout. Neat. Also, here's this one, which is a better example of how I was seeing things.

After having lingered a sufficiently long time on top of the freezing Arc, we decided to stroll down the Champs-Elysees (right there is a link to a song that everyone in this country knows. It's like their equivalent of our Bohemian Rhapsody or something)

There were Christmas lights...they were very cool...it looked like the trees were covered in melting ice.

Only one more entry til I'm finished with Paris!

On a side note...in less than two weeks I'll be back home. Thing I'm looking forward to right now: napping on a couch.