We made it

After a 6 hour delay in PDX (I'll get into it later) we've made it to our hotel in the Rue Cler Neighborhood. Here's a picture of this little place in the heart of Paris.

Just to the west of our hotel is a little street shopping area called Rue Cler. We took a stroll down the street and it's filled with all different types of vendors. Bakeries, meat shops, cafes, flower shops, and a few random shops litter the street.

We are with in walking distance of just about everything. When the taxi dropped us off today, we took a long walk through our neighborhood to the Eiffel Tower. There's a large open area in front of the Tower. It really felt a lot like the Washington Mall in DC. There are lots of flowers and trees in bloom right now. It made for a very nice walk.

We had a small lunch at a nice cafe, people watched, and talked about how we're going to stay up for another 5 hours (at this point we've been up for 24 hrs & 23 mins). We also mused about some of the things that we are already amazed with. Here are our top three:
Thing #1 that we are amazed with: We're in France!!! After all this time we really are here.
Thing #2 that we are amazed with: The buildings. There is so much detail and there could be 12 different designs in one block
Thing #3 that we are amazed with: The people are really nice. Our taxi driver was great, the waiter in the cafe was really cool, and everyone else has been very pleasant (We made an effort to speak in French and I believe that really helped out).

Here are some more pictures of today's walk. We didn't do too much because of travel and if you want to read about what happened to us getting here continue reading beyond the next few pictures. Be warned though... I might not be entirely politically correct in my description of the events...

Warning warning... non-pc comments below:

So we showed up at the airport at 6am. We got to the terminal with no problems. When we get there we notice a lot of people shuffling around. Apparently the entire Alaska Air & United Airlines computer systems were down on the west coast. Plains are fueled and ready to go in the terminals but they can't check people in even if they have a confirmed ticket. So we get delayed 4 hours and get re-routed through Salt Lake City which would have been fine until we boarded and find out that we just checked into a 10.5 hour jail sentence with an entire High School on a class trip to Paris or something like that. So when we're trying to board, there's this 'hey you want to switch sets?' game, 'hey look at me doing this' game, and 'hey lets take 800 pictures of me with everyone in my freaking class on the plane (not in Paris yet)' going on with like 80 freaking kids. I'd like to say that I wasn't like that in High School... hopefully...
But we're here and that's what counts.