Breakfast on the plane was bleh. Egg white "pucks" and lukewarm sausage. Couldn't tell if the bread was suppose to be a croissant or a biscuit. Only things worth eating were the fruit and the yogurt. Oh well, life goes on.
When we got to customs, even though there were few passengers there, they made us walk through an empty maze which seemed to have a hundred switchbacks -- I feel like we were being taken on a forced march. The automatic passport readers were only working half the time so many people were having to make multiple attempts on different machines to get them to read the passport info.
Clearing customs we were met by our Viking representatives who put us with one other couple in an executive Mercedes van for the 45 minute drive to our hotel. We will be traveling with them for the next week. They are from San Francisco and he works for LAM Research. At the hotel we were greeted by Danny who will be our coordinator while in Paris. It was about 12:30 when we checked in at the hotel but they said our room would not be available until 4 (and Alice was fading fast).
We first made a quick walk over to the Eiffel Tower, about two blocks away. It was fun watching all the people climbing the stairs in the corners to the second level, they looked like armies of ants going up and down the stairs.
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We sat in the hotel lobby for awhile then decided to go in search of food (else we would have fallen asleep). Danny recommended a few restaurants within walking distance and we ended up at Café Fleur, a classic French restaurant that was packed with people inside and out. We had a hard time deciding what it was we wanted to order. Our waiter was infinitely patient with us and kept coming back to our table. We finally ordered chicken cordon bleu with frites that was very good. We followed that with a crepe that had Nutella, berries and whip cream. It was a cultural experience.
While waiting for our food the manager brought over two plates with some sort of sandwich topped with a fried egg. Unable to speak French, we were challenged in getting him to understand that was not what we ordered (unless of course chicken cordon bleu is entirely different from what we knew). Reading the confusion on my face, he finally got the message and took the food to the people at the next table.
Re-energized with food, we returned to the hotel and they had our room ready for us. We have a view (sort of) of the Eiffel Tower from our room.
It's now 7 pm and I think we are calling it a night*. We have two tours tomorrow, an overview tour of Paris in the morning, and a trip out to the Palace of Versailles in the afternoon.
Daily Step Count*: 7,368 which included the maze in customs at the airport, walking to the restaurant, and a walk through the neighborhood this evening.
*After writing this we decided to do a walk around the neighborhood adding some more steps, scoping out possible restaurants for the next two nights.
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