Day 8: Hotel Nikko de Paris

On day 6 we drove home and quickly unpacked, did laundry, and packed again.  Our flight to Paris (which was full, by the way) was on the afternoon of day 7, and we arrived on day 8.  We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel, the Hotel Nikko de Paris.  It was about a 30 minute ride, and our cab driver was insane.  (Not really, he was quite calm, but he drove very, very fast.)  His cab was a Mercedes, which isn't as rare in Europe as it is here in the U.S.  I saw the speedometer reach about 170 kph (around 105 MPH) at the fastest, and he was passing other cars with speed differentials that must have been around 30-40 MPH.  At one point I noticed the speed limit was 90 kph (about 55 MPH) and he was going 150 (almost 100 MPH).

Anyway, we survived, and the hotel was quite nice.  (Click for Hotel Nikko de Paris web site.)  We don't know if it was because of the "honeymoon couple" note on our reservation made by the tour company, but we got a very nice corner room on the 21st floor.  It turned out that the hotel was in a somewhat quiet residential neighborhood, a bit removed from most of the places we wanted to see, but it wasn't that far of a walk, and the Metro (subway) was very easy to use.  And we had a 20 minute walk to the Eiffel Tower, which was nice.

Interestingly, the Nikko is part of a complex of tall buildings, but the rest are apartment buildings.  In this picture you can see part of the track/tennis courts complex:

We actually got quite a bit of amusement out of watching the traffic in this major intersection from our hotel room window, at least on the weekdays (rush hour).  It was very similar to traffic in Boston - the people trying to turn left would all bunch up together and the people trying to turn in the two oncoming directions would block each other, so each time the light turned green it would turn into instant gridlock that wouldn't move until the light turned red again, stopping the cars going straight, so people could finally turn left.  It would have been great if we'd had a video camera...

This picture is from the bridge right in front of the Nikko, the hotel is out of the frame to the right:

And here it is, the red building just off-center to the right is the Nikko.  Our room was on the back right-hand corner of the building from this perspective.