I went to Paris for ADASS XXI - a computational astronomy conference - it was an interesting conference full of the wonders of GPUs (I wrote about the [conference] and my [poster] previously). anyway, I also did some site seeing as my lovely other half flew out (Birmingham to Paris is a rather short flight) and we did a weekend of site seeing... here are a few highlights:
Of course you can't go to Paris and not go on and on about the Eiffel Tower... so I will. We went up it on definitely the worst day whilst we were there. It was very reduced visibility but oddly eerily cool:
from the top you just couldn't see a thing:
though later that night, it was just spectacular:
A surprise highlight of my trip was going into the Galeries Lafayette, something that Elizabeth wanted to see... pretty expensive shop but one heck of a focus:
She also surprised me by suggesting we go to Sainte-Chapelle - I had heard of this but was blown away by the place. I supposedly looked very disappointed by the first, lower room:
but the upper room is just "wow":
We did the other tourist things, going to Notre-Dame, Sacre Coeur, the Louvre and a bunch of palaces and squares but I won't bore you with a discussion of each (but if you want to see some pictures go take a look [at my flickr set]). The other things that really stood out to me where the awesome size of La Défense:
and seemingly never ending Musée d'Orsay:
Overall we had a great time and well we got a lot in in such a short stay, probably helped by the epic metro... never had to wait more than 5 minutes for a train! On that note I'll leave you with a picture of sunset over Place de la Concorde:
(oh and if you want to see more did I mention [my flickr set]? :-) )
