29/12 Paris, Day 3 - I'm a sucker for pretty lookout points

I'm typing this as I wait for our dinner to be served. We're eating at a Pakistani restaurant at Chateau d'Eau, and I just ordered Beef Vindaloo. Good thing I'm an expert in Indian food, because it's the same thing everywhere, so the french menu was a piece of cake when you see things like 'boeuf Vindalo' and 'poulet Tikka Masala' on it (I took Spanish and knew 'pollo' means chicken. Not exactly rocket science to figure that one out).

Today we walked up the stairs to the top of Arc de Triomphe, and breathed in the spectacular star shaped roads panning out from the roundabout around the arch. Its amazing how Napoleon originally planned this to be the gate through which his victorious armies would march through when they come home from battles. Engraved with names of wars and their generals, it is now just a place where people mostly just visit to take pictures, stare questioningly at the statues and wonder how much power is being wasted keeping the 'eternal flame' alight every single day, all day long. But it does all that with magnificent style, of course.

'eh asal smalam nampak besar lagi bendalah ni?'

Haha...tadi tu dari tepi rupanya -____-" Malu je orang sme pandang amek gamba kat situ.

Champs Elysees from the top of Arc de Triomphe. At the very end of one of these streets panning out from the Arc, we could see the modern Grand Arche at La Defense that I put pictures of a couple of entries back.

After that we walked down Champs Elysees again, this time in bright daylight. We didn't spend as much time here as we'd like, because Mas went to Louvre and texted us to say the queue is absolutely insane. So we hurried down the piss-smelling tube station again, and waited for the train (with an excellent saxophone-playing street musician providing a most pleasant background jazz) to Place Monge to pray Dhuhr/Asr at our beloved Paris Mosque.

I was touched when I heard the Dhuhr athan at the mosque...I miss hearing it recited live,instead of a pre-recorded playback one coming from my laptop. We were lucky enough to be able to join the prayer in congregation with the rest of the Muslims (a wide variety of skin tone and hijab style, with Islam being our only common factor), and hurried to get ready for our Louvre experience.

When we got there, we immediately divided ourselves into two groups to take turns taking pictures and lining up at the same time. I went with two of my friends to line up first. When we were queueing there, minding our own business, a French man came to stand directly beside us, holding a sign. He was the museum's employee, holding up a multi-lingual announcement placard. We stared hard at the paragraphs to locate the English version, assuming the guy couldn't speak English. All of a sudden he said;

'Can I help you, miss?'

To which I replied, 'Oh, sorry. Was just looking for the English bit.'

'It says you will reach the ticket counter in an hour and a half'

'Oh! That's not too bad. Thanks!'

'No problem, anything else I can help you with?'

'Nope, we're grand. Merci!' I said, with a cheeky smile. What? He's cute.

'You know what, miss? The entrance fee is free for you if you're studying in a university in an EU country'

...and just like that, we paid nil for our entrance to Louvre. The weird thing is, it's not written ANYWHERE on the information leaflet that we could get in for free. Trust me, I looked long and hard. If that guy hadn't told us about it, we'd have spent 6.50euro each. There were 9 of us. That's a LOT of money saved.

some random hobo I met at the Louvre

The weird thing is, when we wanted to go up Arc de Triomphe earlier that day, I told the lady at the ticket counter I wanted to buy Adult tickets, and cheekily added that we bought Paris Visite tickets yesterday and didn't use it for discount purposes at all...just in case we can use it today (when it clearly stated on the Paris Visite tickets that we can only use it on the day it was bought).

She took one look at me, winked, and said 'yeah sure', to my complete amazement. But that's not all. She also added

'You sure you want ADULT tickets, miss? Adults are over 25s,'

'OH. Really? I mean...what do I get then? Child ones?' stupidest question of the century.

'*laughs* No, but you can get cheaper ones,'

We got half priced tickets. We saved TONS that day, alhamdulillah. My friends semua cakap nasib baik Atiq yang pegi beli, so muka kanak-kanak yang tak logik above 25 at all, sampai orang tu heran apesal nak beli tiket Adult. Haha....cis kau. Padahal nak gelakkan aku pendek. Bagus punya kawan-kawan. I'm just going to go ahead and take it as a compliment.

Louvre experience was...amazing. I can go on FOREVER about the things in there. If I went there alone I could've easily spent double the time there than I did that day, but alas. Travelling in a group requires tolerance. Not everyone wants to spend hours on end looking at important pieces of history (Code of Hammurabbi! WHAT...I can't even) and legendary paintings (Mona Lisa! WHAT). I won't be pretentious and claim to be in LOVE with museums...but this was the first international museum I stepped foot on, one that displays historical artefacts from all over the globe. Their wide collection was actually really impressive.

This was from a Roman empire building, if I'm not mistaken. It's MASSIVE, and it was one of many, many, tiangs (somehow I can't recall what tiang is in English) that look exactly like it, that was part of the building. Bayangkan how enormous the building was. Bayangkan sekarang.

Tomorrow we head to Bruxells!