Paris - Day 4. The Statue of Liberty

On Sunday I had an afternoon flight back home and I didn't need to check out of the hostel before noon. J had caught an early train to Switzerland. To kill some time I went for a little walk around Paris. I also wanted to check if they had stocked up the stamp machine at the Eiffel tower so that I could send some postcards, but no such luck.

I would love to come back to Paris. It's such a beautiful city and there is so much left to see and do. Like Rome it has loads of old buildings, but unlike Rome the streets are really wide and open. Except for Montmartre and at the big tourist attractions I didn't feel like the streets were crowded with tourists at all. Paris is a great city to walk everywhere in, there is so much to look at, but the public transpot system is great as well. Even when one line of the metro was closed I could always get where I wanted just by hopping on another one.

When I was on the Metro to get back to the hostel to get my luggage and check out, I saw the Statue of Liberty while the Metro was on a bridge over the Seine!! I had totally forgot that France of course had it's own statue of Liberty. It's much much smaller than the one in New York, but it's the first one I've seen with my own eyes. I just had to get off the Metro and see it up close.

The statue is on a cute narrow man-made pedestrian island in the middle of the Seine, Île aux Cygnes. Unfortunately I had to rush to the other end of it to see the statue, but I wish I had had some time to just leisurely stroll down it, it was lovely and there was hardly any people there. I think the few people that were walking were locals, nobody looked like a typical tourist anyway.

The very end where the statue was standing was closed off, it looked like there was some work going on there, so it will probably be possible to walk there in the future, but I still managed to get quite close to it. It was really cool to see it up close, it was almost more special because it's not the one everybody talks about, but it's also not the original one that apparently stands in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The one I saw is from 1889, and it's been used in the movie National treasure; Book of Secrets (isn't Google great?! Apparently there is heaps of Replicas of the Statue all over the world).

I am really looking forward to seeing the big one in New York next year though!