Day 5

Other than Gallerie Lafayette (the dept store), another company that is heavily advertised is l'Open Tour. They run open-top double-decker bus service on 4 routes through out Paris. Their 4 routes hit most of the major landmarks in Paris and you pay by day (1 day pass costs 25 euro and 2 day pass costs just 3 more euro) so you could get on and off as much as you like. Sounds attractive huh? Of course we took the bait and went for their 2 day passes. Their "greatest hit" route is the green route, which stops at Louvre, Eiffel Tower, La Madeleine, Musee d'Orsay, Concorde Plaza, Notre Dame, and our plan for this day: Champs Elysees and Arc De Triomphe.

Champs Elysees 

Champs Elysees is probably the most famous street in France (or in the world!), best known for luxury name brand stores and cafe. The shopping section of the street was actually smaller than I expected as one section of the street neighbours to a park, where we saw lots of families were having fun. Also most of the name brand stores didn't really intimidatingly "stand out" (except LV) It feels more like just having a presence in the most prestigious shopping area in the world. Maybe it has to do with luxury being so natural a part of Paris. We had lunch at an moderately priced Italian restaurant Bistro Romain, facing the street. The quality of food was really not bad (another surprise! Most tourisy restaurants at prime location in other places of the world serve mediocre food at outrageous price. I guess French really have a thing about defending their reputation of good food.)


Arc De Triomphe 
Along with Eiffel Tower, Arc De Triomphe serves as the most recognized landmark of Paris. (Personally the view of it surrounded by the "radiating" roads was my first impression of Paris because of a postcard sent by my dad when he visited Paris many many years ago) This was the first time I went under the Arc and I immediately felt that this was the kind of thing better appreciated from a distance. Nevertheless, you can't say you've been there unless you've been there!

We hopped back on the bus along the "green route" all the way to Notre Dame again, for the famous Berthillon ice cream at Latin Quarter. There are actually more than one ice cream places that bear Berthillon as part of their name. We didn't bother to figure out which one was the original Berthillon and just picked the one with the longest line :P Berthillon ice cream was indeed fabulous and worthy of the wait! The ice cream was almost our dinner (Oh yeah, we did have crepes after ice cream, at one of the cafe facing Notre Dame.)