Italy/Paris - Day 6

I believe this was my first experience shopping in a grocery store in a foreign country. It wasn't all that different from the stores at home, but the little things made it interesting. Trying to read product labels in a language you don't understand is not that easy to do. We picked out a couple bottles of local wine and headed to the cash register. When the guy behind the register asked us a question, we assumed it was the typical "paper or plastic?" and went with the smile and nod technique that we had perfected over the trip.

After checking out from the hotel, we jumped into a taxi to head back to the airport. Upon arrival, we joined a very long line to check-in for our flight. European airports are just dumb. Lucky for us we found a self-service kiosk with an Air France attendant standing next to it. She spoke enough English to help us get our tickets and we managed to skip the line.

Landing in Paris, we prepared ourselves for our first solo subway ride. When Julie picked us up on the first morning, we were pretty tired and out of it. I had tried to take mental notes at the time, and now was time to find out if we could retrace our steps. Lucky for us we managed to make it on the right train and even changed trains once to end up back at Julie's place. Here we took a short break to prepare for our cross town trek to the hotel where we'd be spending our last couple of nights.

I'm sure the sight of us dragging our luggage across the Garden of Tuileries was quite the site. I was battling an extremely large and heavy suitcase affectionately dubbed, "The Behemoth." How we managed to check this bag at the airport and not get charged for it when the scale went upwards of 54 lbs. is beyond me.

We finally found our hotel and got checked in. The place was nice, but extremely small. But we didn't care, we dropped our bags and decided to scope out our new surroundings. We were staying in a nice part of town just north of the Louve. There were many interesting stores and we found a few clothing designers' boutiques. With the sun starting to go down, and some rain clouds on the horizon, we made our way the our new 'home away from home' to grab a bite to eat.

On the patio of the Great Canadian we ordered food as it began to rain. We ate and watched as couples walking along the river laughed and ran for cover. Being that it was ladies night at the TGC, we decided to hang out there and wait for Julie to meet us for some drinks. We sat at the bar and watched Sex in the City until the rain let up and we called it a night and headed back to the hotel.