Thanks for the birthday wishes!

See the thing I circled? That is the Eiffel Tower.

It's my birthday and I'm in Paris. I don't really care about my birthday, but I was kind of excited that we were scheduled to do a Seine River cruise to see Paris illuminated by night on my birthday... so of course it was switched to tomorrow night! :-/

Today the "Nouvelle Eve" cabaret show called our tour director and said that tomorrow night, they won't be offering the early show with dinner (just the late show with drinks), so they needed to switch the tour group to tonight since the dinner was part of what everyone who signed up for that paid for.  I never had any interest in that, so I didn't sign up for it.  In any case, our tour director flipped the nights on the cabaret show/dinner and the Seine cruise, so I suddenly found myself with no plans on my birthday.  I was bummed, even though like I said, I don't care about my birthday that much - I still felt like I should have something to do.

Enter Australian people. I had decided to myself to spend a quiet night in and take a hot bubble bath and sort out my luggage and all the other 3 bags full of stuff I've accumulated on this trip.  The only thing I didn't have was something to eat (and room service at the hotel was super expensive and not very good), so I headed to the supermarket next door to the hotel to find some wine and some food.  And I bumped into a bunch of travel companions who also had decided not to attend the cabaret and they invited me to the roof of the hotel to drink wine and hang out.  I bought a big French baguette, some brie and some paper plates and knives and headed up to hang with the Aussies and little did I know, but you could see the Eiffel Tower from our hotel roof (despite being 20 minutes out of Paris).  We drank wine for about an hour and then headed to a restaurant for dinner.  It was one of the many Australian couples, the one couple from Ontario, this one Australian guy who is also a single traveller and the South African couple. 

Anyway, it was fun and then I did come back to the hotel and had a nice long bubble bath and washed off all the travelling. By the way, I may have mentioned this before, but Trafalgar buys you a gift if it's your birthday (and makes the entire bus sign "Happy Birthday" to you which is just horrific in my opinion) and today my gift was the pictured book.  It was especially funny and ironic to receive this given all the conversations that Heather and I had yesterday about Switzerland.  This book is quite modern and humourous and it even had a full 2 pages on how to insult people and swear in Swiss German which I really appreciated.

So my birthday has come and gone... I'm now 39 for the 4th time.  Anyway, I have one day in Paris tomorrow - I will be going on a city orientation tour of all the major sights and then I will be going up the Eiffel Tower, then touring Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter... then we get about 3 or 4 hours of free time and I plan to visit "Le Marais" and the Centre Pompidou and then we have our night cruise on the Seine at around 7pm.  If anyone has any other ideas about what I should do with my spare time, please leave suggestions in the comments.

À demain!