What a scintillating, amazing city! How can so many famous streets and astounding monuments and impressive palaces and enormous museums and bridges and buildings and churches be in one place?!
Turns our our apartment is a hop, skip, & a jump from the Eiffel Tower, so we high-tailed it out the door to find it as soon as we got ourselves settled in. We were already feeling giddy about having an apartment in Paris for gosh sakes, but when we turned a corner and saw the top of the Tour de Eiffel for the first time we jumped up and down and hugged each other with glee! Had to wipe a little tear away!
One of the MANY awe-inspiring places in Paris we viewed from the bus the next day (yes, we had worn ourselves a little thin with exploration on foot in the rain and wind the day we got there) was Opera Garnier. Um huh, it's the palace (too luxurious to call it a building) with a massive dome and underground lake and huge chandelier that inspired Gaston Leroux to write a story called The Phantom of the Opera.
Well, of course we were enchanted and decided to go back later to see what we could see. Turns out there was a performance going on that night. We managed to decipher that there would be an opera by Mozart (an all-time favorite!) called L'Enlevement au serail (never heard of it!) and that we could get obstructed view seats in an otherwise sold-out house for merely 10 euro. Which we jumped at, although with our very limited French language skills we weren't exactly sure exactly what we were jumping at! We just knew we were going inside the sumptuously dazzling place to see an opera! In Paris!
Best part yet: The enormously talented performers sang their parts in German (um, not our 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th language). But not to fear because there were subtitles above the stage to translate for us. And of course those subtitles were in - you guessed it - French! (I'm putting my comprehension level at oh, about 12% - but I think Diana's was much higher!)
A night at the opera in Paris! What's next?!!!!!!
