A brief layover in Paris on our way to Italy

Michael had a Fall Break from classes at Duke at the end of October so we decided to spend it in Italy for the week. The plan was to meet in Florence on Friday and spend the next 5 days seeing as much of Italy as we could. Michael had a layover in Paris on his way there and I was flying from Munich to Florence. Plans sort of changed...



I got staffed on a project in Paris for a couple days before our trip and thought it would be a great idea if I surprised Michael by getting on his flight. What a great idea, right? I still can not believe that I didn't slip up and tell him about being in Paris that week.



Friday morning came and I waited quite impatiently for his flight from the U.S. to get in. Finally I saw the jet lagged Michael wander into the terminal. He had to look twice when he saw me and then realized it was actually me. I think he was more confused than surprised at first.



Since his flight got in early, I thought we should try and catch an earlier flight to Pisa to get us closer to Cinque Terre, our final destination that day. After a rather long and stressful event of switching tickets, Michael made it back to our terminal with his new ticket only to find out that there were no seats left for me on the flight. Great. This also has made us too late to catch our original flight to Florence and the next flight to Pisa or Florence doesn't leave until 4PM. Wonderful. Instead of sitting in the airport for half of a day, we decided to head back into Paris and see some of the city.



First stop, Notre Dame. I forgot how incredibly impressive this church is.

Door on the front of Notre Dame. I was standing outside of this on Thursday night when Michael called saying that he was boarding his plane. He thought I was packing and getting ready in Munich. :)

Michael came back to rescue me from all of the crazy birds in front of Notre Dame. It may not have been Italy, but at least we were both on the same continent that day.

Eiffel Tower in the distance. We had lunch on a bridge that had a great view of the city. Thankfully Michael can also speak French so I let him take care of ordering lunch at the deli. They had all sorts of fancy coffee's on the menu so of course I picked out a super girly one for him to order for me. Apparently the guy behind the counter didn't quite understand him because he came back with chocolate milk. A little child's container of chocolate milk that had a foil top to peel off, almost the same thing as a coffee.

What a great day in Paris! We took the train back to the airport with plenty of time to catch our flight to Pisa. The only problem was we didn't plan in enough time for the train to break down. Michael has no idea what is going on because he is so tired so he just tries to sleep through it. I watched the train operators walk around the train several times looking underneath it. After what felt like hours, we finally started moving again. We made it back to the airport in time to start the rest of our adventure!