Paris Night 3-Notre Dame

After the Louvre we walked over to see Sainte-Chapelle. I've seen pictures of the stained glass and really wanted to see it! The outside looked really cool! But then we found out it was going to cost $10 to go inside and we decided we could wait on the stained glass. So we walked a few more minutes over to Notre Dame. It was really cool to be in Notre Dame. I'm reading a book about Mary Queen of Scots right now and she was married there so my history geek side was freaking out a little. We walked all around the cathedral and then we sat for a few minutes. We ended up taking like a 10 minute power nap there. I felt a little disrespectful for falling asleep, but it was really needed apparently! We also walked over to Place de la Bastille and then headed over to Opera Garnier so we could meet my friend for dinner. Claire, was an exchange student from France at my high school when I was a junior in high school and she is living in Paris right now!

Outside of Sainte-Chapelle

Notre Dame

Hard to tell from the light, but these are the gargoyles

Place de la Bastille

We had some time to kill and just happened to notice a Lindt store just down the street so we headed there. They had so much amazing looking chocolate in there! They had lots of truffle flavours I haven't seen here. Hazelnut, strawberries and cream, citrus, mint chocolate bites, whole hazelnuts covered in chocolate and so many different flavoured bars. We got some chocolate and then headed back to Opera Garnier to wait for Claire. All of a sudden we hear cop cars and people chanting something. The cop cars were leading a huge sea of people right to the steps where we were. They had signs and were chanting. We caught enough from the signs and the chanting to know it was for International Women's Day. I loved getting to see men and women come together for women's rights. We somehow found Claire in the madness and then headed to a restaurant. We wanted to get something that felt French so I ordered duck confit and frites and Greg had herb crusted salmon. It was great to catch up with Claire! Thank you social media! After dinner we decided to take the train home because we were already at almost 30,000 steps so we were exhausted. We stopped at the market for a couple quick things we wanted to bring home with us and then we had to get ready to go home...This trip was absolutely amazing. I've waited my whole life to visit France and it was perfect. The food, seeing almost everything I wanted to in 2 1/2 days, and getting to experience it all with Greg. Coming home was especially hard because, as amazing as the trip was, it was a little bittersweet for us. For a few weeks we thought we might be moving to France for Greg to finish his PhD at a great business school in France. We have always wanted to live in Europe and France was at the top of our list. It ended up not working out which we were ok with because we are really loving Boston, but it did leave a small bitter note on our trip knowing our Europe dream will be postponed until after grad school. We are hoping to do a longer Europe vacation next summer, but until then I will just be looking obsessively over all of our pictures!