Bonjour!
OK I’ve got my French greeting sorted out now, sorry to all of you whom picked up that most glaring error in the first word of my first blog post… Uagh!
Well, the first thing of note after settling into my hotel room, was that I realised I’ve forgotten all of my socks. 5 pairs bought especially for this trip, and I’ve gone and packed them into the carton that is being shipped home to Australia. Oops! Consequently, I’ve been wearing the same pair of socks now for 4 days, so it’s turned into an interesting exercise in finding out just how often I actually need to do my laundry…
But in major news, Paris has been magnificent! I’m very glad to have started my trip here, with fantastic company of course! Though I think all weather forecasters need to be sacked, because it was predicted to rain all weekend, but when I woke up on Friday morning to sunshine, I immediately dragged Hannah up and enacted a plan to cram as much into the day as humanely possible – just in case the glorious weather didn’t hold up.
We started out a bit after sparrow’s fart, and headed immediately to the Louvre, with the intention of beating the crowds. Success, in more ways than one. I’ve quickly realised that tourists are stupid. Even though there weren’t an overly large number of people waiting to buy tickets, we found it quite amusing that people would instinctively flock to the queue with the longest line, even though there are four separate ticket lines, one in each corner of the foyer, underneath the main pyramid. We literally walked past a line of about 50 people, towards the next corner where two ladies sat with bored expressions and no queue whatsoever, and promptly purchased our passes. I have noticed this curious tourist stupidity phenomenon on several occasions since – also for example at the Eiffel Tower. People tended to gravitate towards the longest queue. I suppose they think that ‘this is the longest line, so it must be the one I’m supposed to be in’. Got me stuffed, I have better things to do than line up for hours…
So anyway, we did the Louvre in record time – just under 2.5 hours. I almost felt that I didn’t get value for money! But we charged our way through whilst there were no crowds, but sure enough, by about 10.30am, they had come in droves. Everyone naturally wants to see just the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. Well, I’m the same really. I’ve seen enough art to poke a stick at and there’s only so much appreciation of the classics that one can have. It’s rumoured that if you stopped and appreciated every single piece of artwork in the Louvre, you would be doing it for 9 months. I believe it – the place is enormous!
From there, we strolled outside into the beautiful sunshine and walked down the river, past countless bridges. It was here that we had our first ‘gypsie’ encounter – one of several for the weekend. Well, I was standing by one of the ponts (bridges) when a short, tanned gypsie lady walked up behind Hannah, dropped down onto the ground and came up, presenting us with a gold ring that she’d ‘found’. Well of course it must be ‘ours’ that we’ve dropped, though clearly we had not lost a faux gold ring that looked like it was a prop out of a well known Tolkien fairytale. But if you don’t know how to play the game, you can end up in all sorts of strife. The dishonest person will ‘claim’ the ring, whereby the Gypsie will then push you for a ‘reward for finding it’. Say it’s not yours, and they try to sell it to you. Take the ring off them at any time, and good luck giving it back – as once you’ve taken something from a Gypsie, or any other scammer or salesman, whether they are selling you cheap Eiffel Tower souveniers, or a red rose for your wife, you pretty much have to drop it on the ground to say you don’t want to pay the price they are asking. Get caught in the wrong place, and they’ll probably have ‘friends’ somewhere too. Anyway, we played the Gypsies game, and a few moments later as we continued to stroll down the river, we saw the Gypsies friends – two more identical looking women playing exactly the same game with other unsuspecting tourists. I felt like stopping to wait for one of them to come up, and then play a different card like ‘oh yeah you found another ring? I think it belongs to your friend up the road as she has an identical one, she just showed me…’
Anyway, it’s not even lunchtime yet, and we finish checking out a huge stretch of the Siene River, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and then stroll into the busy and colourful Latin Quarter where it’s time for a kebab. I thought it was hilarious that I found a French variation – your kebab served on a French stick (baguette roll).
Next, we decide it’s such a nice day, and we have plenty of time, so we walk to the Eiffel Tower, past the ‘Invalides’ where Napolean is buried underneath a large church dome, and the French Military Academy. The Eiffel Tower was gorgeous, and though we didn’t go up straight away, we did walk under, then found across the river that there was a huge screen setup in the plaza near the bridge, where they were showing live telecasts of the soccer World Cup games. Large crowds were busy getting into that.
We finished the first day checking out the Arc de Triumph, which is quite spectacular. How the cars managed to navigate around it without lane markings has got me stuffed, but it was quite impressive to watch. Instead of doing the rat-run across the road, there’s a tunnel underneath and then we crossed over to the Champs Elysees, the famous French street with all the expensive cafe’s and designer shopping. It was pretty impressive, but really just a cooler version of Oxford Street in London, or Pitt Street in Sydney. Quite leafy and shady though.
With burning feet from the day’s walk, we headed off with a few beers under our belt , to see Supergrass. Basically this was Hannah’s all time favourite band apparently, and it was there last ever gig, since the band was breaking up. It was purely by chance that the gig date landed on the start of my Paris trip, so Hannah jumped at the chance to grab some tickets. It was at a venue called La Cigale, just up the road from the Moulin Rouge. The gig was fantastic, we went and got more beers, and made fools of ourselves taking photos outside the Moulin Rouge and the various other fine establishments of the red light district.
Saturday was a trip into the main part of Paris where all the famous covered shopping arcades were located. They have quite an old school charm about them, sort of takes you back a hundred years or so. We also checked out Lafayette’s which is the Paris equivalent of shopping at Harrod’s department store. A lovely building. From there, we walked down to a famous square where a statue of Napoleon resides next to an abundance of expensive shops and Hotels, including the Ritz Hotel. This is probably the most famous – and expensive – hotel in Paris, and was where Princess Diana was staying the time she was in Paris when she was killed in the car accident. We saw all those tunnels too, I can easily see how there could be a high speed chase around the water’s edge.
Some of the boutique shops we looked through were full of extraordinary items. Fancy some exotic fungi trouffle, at 4,000€ per 125g? Or how about caviar at 1500€ per 100g? If I purchased three of those caviar containers, that would be my budget for my entire trip – gone! Well, come to Paris where you can find all these luxury goods to blow your mind, and your cash! Mind you, Hannah had been doing a great job at eroding my budget, showing no ‘merci’. Though I already had expected that Paris would be a fairly expensive city, I would have to at least double my daily allowance from 30€ to 60€. But when it’s your first time in Paris, there are just some things that you have to do – and entrance fees, dinners, hotel rooms and Metro tickets all unavoidably add up! All I can say is, thank God for Lidl supermarkets, where you can stock up on cheap groceries and booze. 3 x 500ml cans of german beer for 1€ is a fantastic deal in anyone’s language!
Hannah had a craving for this ‘fondue’ restaurant, so we headed there for dinner, located near the famous church on the hill – Sacre Coeur. The fondue was a big pot of cheese which you dipped bread into. Apparently it’s rare that two people will finish their entire cheese fondue – we somehow managed it quite easily… They served the wine in baby bottles! So it was quite amusing watching hoards of people – mostly Americal college students on vacation – sipping their rouge vin in this fashion! The view from the church at sunset was quite spectacular, and I don’t remember getting home after ‘super marche’ crawling our way back down to Nation via a canal.
Sunday was spent recovering a bit, though eventually we headed off to some authentic French markets, ate some crepes and walked along an elevated subway track that had been converted into a garden and park. Apparently this was the original garden that was used as inspiration for the new elevated garden that has just opened up in New York City. We came across a lot of live entertainment, festivals and the like over the course of the whole weekend. Paris just seems to be teeming with activity all the time!
To finish off our stay in Paris, we decided that some authentic French cuisine was in order. Budget conscious, there had been some significant research into the best place to go to experience this, and amazingly enough, the place we chose was both cheap on price, as well as brilliant on the food and service. ‘La Chartier’ had all the classic signs of a French restaurant, and we ordered some fantastic traditional food. Escargo for entree – snails in a garlic butter sauce – were surprisingly very good! I had visions of snails tasting like bad oysters, but not the case. Then for mains we had the Steak Tartare (raw steak patty) and the glazed duck, both of which are also traditional French favourites. And the Bordeaux red wine was delicious to wash it down!
There was only one thing left to do – climb the Eiffel Tower. We planned on getting there for dusk, to se the city in both daylight and night time, but we did in this instance, underestimate the queue. Then, after waiting in line for 45 minutes, we got to within 3 people of the ticket booth, when on the window they put up a sign to the effect that the 3rd (top) floor was now closed due to over crowding. Well, I was devastated, but because the sign was in French, we pretended not to understand it, then when the lady told us no… well it would have won an Oscar… the face I pulled and the line I babbled about how we’d been in line the whole time, and that it wasn’t worth going up at all, then just as we thought all hope was lost, the lady caved in and sold us the last tickets for the evening, to reach the top floor! Woop!
So we got there in the end. The tower is amazing, a great view, and we were on it when all the lights were turned on – a fantastic illumination of 20,000 glittering strobe lights that goes off every hour from sunset, right up and down the whole tower.
Well, it was a great day, and I didn’t envy Hannah having to get up and head off to the Eurostar the next morning to go back to work at 9am in London! Myself? I’ll be heading off on the first cycling leg of my trip. Amiens, here I come!
