You thought they would never come...

The pictures from my trip to downtown Paris last week! I've been sifting and editing since supper. Here we go!

My first stop was l'hotel de Ville (The paris city hall)

This is the main hall, so to speak, of the Paris city hall. The whole building is quite impressive.

They had stained glass windows showing all the different professions and the years the organizations were founded. This one is the swordmakers. I'm not sure why it came out sideways.

This is the sailors, I believe. I have pictures of the windows for a lot of different older professions.

One of many pretty chandeliers in the city hall

There were a lot of ships in the city hall. The river was quite important to the development of the city.

The outside of the city hall is also very pretty.

My next stop was the Palais Royale. As mentioned previously, it used to house royalty and now it houses several branches of the French government. It was quite fancy. We actually walked through an ornately decorated computer room with paperwork piled all over the place.



I was really hoping they would have even older ones sitting out, but they didn't.


Looking out of a window in the Palais Royale.


A panoramic shot of the Louvre. This isn't exactly scientific, as you can especially tell from the right side of the picture, but you get the idea. Sort of. It doesn't look nearly as big in the picture as it is. Look at the arch two pictures down. That is a three or four story structure in the middle of the clump of trees in this picture, and it is so far away that you can't even see it. Also, it looks in the picture like those two towers ahead are on the back "wall" of the fortress. They aren't. They are at the end of the block. A road runs through and the complex continues on the other side.

An angel on the roof of the Louvre.

I have no clue what this arch is for. It's just sitting behind the Louvre. My touristy map didn't even mention it. In the average city this thing would be the main attraction.

Random golden statue in the middle of an intersection.

Yay for toy sail boats! They have a bunch of sticks laying around, so when the boats reach one side of the fountain the kids push them back out into the fountain with the sticks and the sails carry them across.

The tower of Saint Jacques

The base of this statue says that it was erected by the schoolchildren of America in grateful memory of the LaFayette Statesmen Soldier Patriot.

This is the French military school in downtown Paris. I'm not sure if it is still a military school, or just a huge museum.

This fountain sits in the plaza where they had the guillotine during the French reformation.

You can see the arc de triomphe off in the distance. I didn't have time to see both that and the eifel tower. Later I found out that I could have gone to the top of the arc for free that weekend, and normally it costs something like 6 Euros. So I should have gone. Oh well. I guess I'll never climb the arc.

Again, this is hardly a scientific pano job, but you get the idea.