J'aime Paris!

Last weekend we visited Paris for a few days.  I had been a few times when I was younger but it was Ryan's first time visiting the city.  Paris is only a 3 hour ride from Geneva on the fast, TGV trains, so we caught the 5:45PM train from Geneva and made it to Paris by 9PM.  How convenient!

We bought our train tickets back in June after finding a good deal on the price.  Little did we know the reason that the tickets were such a good deal was because it was a holiday weekend in Paris, translation = Paris was empty aside from tourists.  We still had a fabulous time checking out the city, but it definitely felt a bit desolate to see a lot of restaurants closed and no Parisians strolling the streets.  Oh well, I guess that just means we will be "forced" to go back another time :)

Since the weather was perfect for strolling, we mainly explored Paris by foot, map in hand, checking in the sites and stopping many of Paris' little cafes and restaurants along the way.

I love that Paris is to close to Geneva by train, it makes for a fabulous weekend get away!  Below are some pictures and stories from the weekend.

Notre Dame cathedral in the evening, so gorgeous

We started off the second day with breakfast at La Duree, a famous Parisian tea house

In true tourist fashion, we purchased a lock, locked it to the Pont des Arts bridge, and tossed the key into the water below to symbolize our eternal love

Our secret mission was to find and attach our lock to Kourtney Kardashian and Scott Disick's lock, which we found after much google searching and picture analyzing. A lot of other people (presumably Americans?) had the same idea in the past because Kourtney and Scott's lock was buried under this bundle

The weather was perfect for strolling, so we waltzed towards Notre Dame to take in the architecture in the daylight

Checking out the Louvre -- did you know it has 16 KILOMETERS worth of galleries inside? that's almost a half marathon within one museum!

In front of the Louvre pyramid, evoking my days of obsessing over the Da Vinci Code mysteries...

More Louvre gorgeous-ness

Louvre

My camera died right around this time, so apologies for the iPhone photos from here on. On Saturday evening we took a tour of the Seine river by boat that took us past the major sites in the city. I would highly recommend this tour to anyone visiting Paris.

One of the river tour boats

On Sunday we met my friend Leah's brother and his girlfriend for brunch in Paris.  They just recently moved to Paris.  What fun to have friends from home in European cities!