Paris Series: Champs-Élysées and Arc de Triomphe

This is another long blog entry but it has some food elements to it … not a lot but “some” :-)

After the visit to the Louvre, I started down the Axe Historique which is a line of buildings, monuments and thoroughfares. This whole line is perfectly aligned east-west. My first stop was the Tuileries Garden where it used to be a palace but was burned down. It is a Saturday afternoon and there are lots of people out on this crisp nice weather.

Further down, the Champs Élysées is something else. There were so much traffic along this world famous avenue.

This is also where the largest Louis Vuitton departmental store is located. All along the avenue are cafes, and luxury stores. I am glad Suanne is not around. :-)

Promised you I will have some food in this blog. Here it is. Crepes seems to be everywhere in Paris and they make it along the sidewalk.

I had the chocolate (Nutella) and banana crepe which costs about 4.50 Euros. It was pretty good. On a chilly day like this, it was good having some warm snacks.

The Arc de Triomphe is located in the middle of a huge roundabout with, listen to this, TWELVE avenues concentrating here! To get to the arch, I had to take the underground path at the end of Champs-Elysees.

It is the largest triumphal arch in the world. It’s kind of hard imagining how large this is from photographs. This is built by Napoleon at the peak of his power.

This is a military monument. There was a short ceremony of some military personnel.

You could climb the steps right up to the top — about 300 steps in all. It was another tough climb with all the equipments I was carrying.

The view from the top was awesome. I could see all the way to the Louvre. One thing I like about Paris is that the height of buildings are capped so that monuments like the arch and Eiffel Tower are not hidden from view.

Here is the view of the Champs-Elysees from the top of the Arc de Troimphe. It’s no wonder this is known as the most beautiful avenue in the world … despite all the traffic.

I stayed for sometime at the top taking pictures. The backdrop is so beautiful up there that I could not resist stealing some shots of the visitors.

On the Eastern side towards La Defense is the “modern arch”. It is actually very cold and breezy up there.

It is also so romantic up there. I like this shot with the Eiffel at the background.

As the sunset, I left and headed next to the Eiffel Tower … I wanted to take night shots of the Tower before calling it a day. I’ll be blogging on Eiffel Tower tomorrow.

Paris is beautiful, don’t you think?

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