Friday, October 25th dawned as a nice sunny day in the 13th arrondissement.

We got off to a later than expected start to the day so we stopped at Boulangerie Brun on Rue de Tolbiac for some treats for breakfast.

We kept heading east and discussed what we should do for lunch.

Lucille pointed out that we were near Chinatown and we could probably find some bubble tea there. We thought that was a great idea, so we turned south in search of said bubble tea.

We found some bubble tea, but not only did I not take any pictures of it, I honestly don’t know which place we got it from. I know I liked it, but just not sure how to find it again. (Like I’m rushing right back there and all.)

We started heading back to the apartment to meet Curtis before we headed off to Palais Garnier.

Not long after we booked our trip over to Paris, Lucille asked me if we had been to Palais Garnier, and I told her we had not been there yet.

So, she had Curtis book the 4 of us an after hours tour.

We were on the bus heading back from our castle tour yesterday when Curtis got the notification that, due to a mix up, we didn’t actually have any tickets to do the tour. They apologized and refunded his money, and offered us free, general admission tickets.

We were disappointed as it would be a lot quieter after hours, we were happy about free tickets, so we headed out to be there by 2:30 pm.

The building is undergoing an exterior renovation so, typical of Paris, it’s all covered up. It’s basically a giant billboard as the front showing what it will look like. Which, as a photographer, was very disappointing.

It was pretty obvious that Palais Garnier is a very popular destination with the amount of people there. It was also obvious that it’s a fairly dark building with really ugly lighting, but I upped my ISO and took photos never the less.

There were plenty of tours going on along with the general public.

The staircase is a pretty popular spot.

It seems like every ceiling panel is painted and there were plenty of patterns and textures everywhere you looked.

The brightest spot in the whole place seemed to be by the windows upstairs that looked out to a very cloudy sky.

We saw what we believed was everything we could in just over an hour, so we headed off to find something for an early supper.

We didn’t have to go very far to find La Brigade – Opéra. It was trying to rain but we sat outside under an umbrella and enjoyed a nice meal. I don’t know what everyone else had, but I had a really nice steak and fries.

It was done spitting when we started heading to the subway to go back to the apartment.

Looks just like a regular movie theatre to me.

We caught the subway back to near the apartment and were in bed fairly early as we have an early start coming up in the morning.

Seemed to walk a lot today but had slightly less steps than yesterday. I ended up with 15,727.