From The Louvre to Arc de Triomphe

Arc de Triomphe can be seen from The Louvre so we decided to just walk the length. As per Google Maps, it's 3.8km/50 min walk. But I guess 3.8km is a long walk when we've already been walking since morning. The 50 minute walk actually took us about 1.5 hr (with some stops).

Route from The Louvre to Arc de Triomphe (from Google Maps)

Upon exiting The Louvre, we passed through Jardin des Tuileries. There are coffee shops here and lots of place to just sit and relax. There's a fountain and we noticed that a lot of people are sitting around it and enjoying the sun. It seems sun bathing is a favorite past time of Europeans in general. Whenever there's sun and water, there would be lots of people in that area.

From The Louvre to Jardin des Tuileries

From Jardin des Tuileries to Placa de Concorde

Jardin des Tuileries

On the other side of Jardin des Tuileries is Place de la Concorde. It is the largest square in Paris. The center of the Place is occupied by a giant Egyptian obelisk decorated with hieroglyphics exalting the reign of the pharaoh Rameses II. It is one of two the Egyptian government gave to the French in the 19th century. The other one stayed in Egypt, too difficult and heavy to move to France with the technology at that time. In the 1990s, President Francois Mitterand gave the second obelisk back to the Egyptians. [Wiki]

The Obelisk at
Place de la Concorde

Place de la Concorde (with a view of Eiffel Tower)

Place de la Concorde (with a view of L'eglise de la Madeleine)

The Place has two fountains. Both fountains had the same form: a stone basin; six figures of tritons or naiads holding fish spouting water; six seated allegorical figures, their feet on the prows of shipsk supporting the pedestal of the circular vasque; four statues of different forms of genius in arts or crafts supporting the upper inverted vasque, whose water shot up and then cascaded down to the lower vasque and then the basin. [Wiki]

From Place de la Concorde, we continued west going to Champs-Élysées. At first I thought the street is filled with shops. I guess I'm wrong. There's a part of it that has a park on one side and some buildings/museum on the other.

Champs-Élysées

After a few more minutes, we reached our destination. Alas, we're face-to-face with Arc de Triomphe. To get to the arc, you have to pass through the underground walkway. When we got there, there's a ceremony being held, not sure what that is for but we waited for it to finish to get some good pictures. Our Museum pass would have allowed us to walk to the top of the arc but since we're tired after walking most of the day, we just got contented taking pictures from below it.