As a teaser, and in case you get bored half way through reading & just want the highlights, other titles considered for this were:
• it’s against the law in French to provide a shower curtain
• wow, that’s really big
• if I go up another spiral staircase, I’ll never regain my equilibrium
• I promise I wore different sweaters every day of the trip, but it was too cold to take off the coat, scarf, hat, and gloves for each picture
• you shouldn’t take longer to get through airport security than you will be in the air
And on to the post.
As you know, Adam has gone back to school to get his MBA. He promises he’s writing a post about his experience, but things like term papers, studying for exams and commenting on the BBTIA baseball blog keep getting in his way. However, two weeks ago he had mid terms; then last week his Thursday class was cancelled (and he doesn’t ever have Friday classes). So, we decided a four day weekend called for a trip to the continent. Paris it was decided.
We flew out of Birmingham. The Bristol airport is about 45 minutes from our house whereas the Birmingham airport is about an hour & half drive, but they have different discount airlines at the two. Flybe out of Birmingham turned out to be about£150 cheaper for our flight, so very worth the extra miles. Getting to the airport, going through security, the flight, and off loading were all pretty uneventful – which is a good thing! They even stamped my passport without me having to ask.
Upon arriving at the airport in Paris, we stopped to purchase museum passes and train / metro tickets. Paris has museum passes for a flat rate that let you into nearly all the top tourist destinations (with the exception of the Effiel Tower). We’d tallied up the places we wanted to go and it was about the same cost as the pass for two days, however with the pass you get to skip all the lines to buy tickets at each place. We decided it was worth paying a bit more to not stand in line. In hindsight, one billion percent worth it. We ended up going to more places because we had extra time (by not waiting in lines) and because it was essentially free with our passes so we figure we saw €63.50 worth of museum entrance fees on our €35 passes.
The woman who sold us the passes also explained how the metro / train system worked (in near perfect English). We were very impressed that she answered questions that we hadn’t even thought of yet. She wasn’t the stereotypical French, can’t stand Americans, person. So armed with our tickets, we headed into the city to drop our bags at the hotel. Not many signs in the train stations are in English, but for the most part, if you can match what it says on the signs to what it says on your metro map (which, incidentally, our was in Italian, because the Tourist Information didn’t have any English, so they gave us one that they had the most of – I guess not many Italians come to Paris??) you can figure out where you’re going for the most part. Only once all weekend did we go the wrong direction & even then we figured it out after one stop...okay, Adam figured it out, I was trying to figure out if the two people on the other side of the train could physically be any closer to each other. Wow, those French don’t seem bothered by PDA – but that’s a whole other story.
We made it to the hotel Thursday and checked in. I’d found the hotel online. The reviews were decent and the pictures online looked nice. It was called the Gold Hotel – sounds fancy – it wasn’t. It was, however, across the street (literally) from the Moulin Rouge and a great price. We went up to our room. I really wish I’d taken a picture of the elevator. If Adam or I had been any wider, we couldn’t have both fit in at the same time. It was the same depth as a person and only two people wide. We took the stairs the rest of the time. It was a much less frightening experience. We get to the room, it was small, but had a double bed and ensuite bath. The bathroom was probably 10X6 but did have a bath/shower combo, sink and toilet. The shower had a curtain rod and rings, but no shower curtain. It looked odd. We were heading out to walk around a bit and get the lay of the land, so we didn’t worry about it then. When we came back to the hotel that evening, we stopped at the front desk and tried to ask for a shower curtain. The receptionist didn’t understand English, so he sent someone else from the hotel up with us. Adam showed him the shower & lack of curtain. From the other room, here is my version of the conversation:
Adam: There is no shower curtain.
Man: No curtain?
Adam: Yes, see, there’s the shower rod, but no curtain to stop the water from going out.
Man: Do you want the water to go out?
Adam: No. We want a curtain.
Man: You want a shower curtain?
Adam: Yes. It’ll keep everything from getting wet.
Man: Do you need a shower curtain?
Adam: (Pause) Yes.
Man: Okay, I’ll tell the manager.
He left our room. Adam & I just stood there in a mix of confusion and bewilderment. About 10 minutes later the man came back and said that he’d talked to his manager and “it’s against the law in French to provide a shower curtain.” At this point we just had to laugh. I don’t believe that it is against the law to provide a shower curtain and I’m amused that the man couldn’t translate the name of his country back to English. So we showered for three days without a curtain and pretty much drenched the entire bathroom. After day one, we learned to keep the towel outside of the room if you wanted it to be dry at the end of the shower.
Friday morning, we got up and headed out of the hotel by 9am, ate a chocolate croissant for breakfast and were in the Musée d’Orsay by 9:45 (it opened at 9:30). The outside isn’t much to look at, but it is one of the most beautiful buildings on the inside. We couldn’t take any pictures inside the museum at all, so you’ll just have take my word for it. The Orsay has mostly Impressionist art. Adam, influenced by a
Doctor Who episode, wanted to see all the van Gogh paintings. They were beautiful. Not being an art historian, I can’t tell you much more than that, but I know I liked the brightness of the colors over many earlier darker (often more religious) works and I liked that I understood what the picture was about much more than the Picasso cubist work.
We walked from the Orsay across the Pont de l'Archevêché bridge were couples lock padlocks on the sides of the bridge to symbolise their love for each other. We’d seen the bridge on the Amazing Race, but you don’t truly understand how many locks are on the bridge until you see it firsthand. We walked through the Tuileries Garden, a beautiful park with a huge water feature in the center.
We found the Louvre and its strangely architecturally significant glass pyramid on top. This is perhaps the place where we were the most grateful for the museum passes. By 11:30 when we got to the Louvre, the line was L-O-N-G. The tourist who stopped us as the guard allowed us to walk past everyone to ask what special ticket we had & where she could buy one said they’d been waiting nearly an hour. From the look of the line, she had another 30 minutes to go. We knew going into the Louvre that there was absolutely no way to see everything. I firmly believe after being there for a while that you could go everyday for a month and not see everything. The place is huge. We hit the highlights, Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, Mona Lisa, Marriage at Cana, and Napoleon’s Coronation. The strange thing to me, they let you take photos everywhere. And they let you get really close to the paintings (with the exception of the Mona Lisa). You can nearly touch them all. You get a strange sense of guilt while there that you don’t look at everything. At one point, I found myself thinking, oh another de Vinci painting. What?? But there is just so much art that your mind can’t take it all in.
We finished up at the Louvre around 2:30pm and started to walk towards stop number 3 of the day: Notre Dame. As we were walking, we realized we hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so we started checking out menus along the street as we walked. All the sudden, it started raining – hard. Amazingly, we were next to a cafe that – all the sudden – looked like it had the best menu in the world (including hot chocolate – I’m pretty sure you’ll get a picture of hot chocolate in every city we visit over here).
We had lunch while the storm passed through and by the time we were finished with our meal, it was down to a sprinkle outside. We only had about five or six blocks to go, so we made a dash for it.
I’ve always loved the architecture of Notre Dame. Not only is ‘flying buttresses’ fun to say, but it’s actually a pretty cool structural concept. We walked through the cathedral and marvelled at the rose windows in the transepts then walked around the outside. The back of the church is actually my favourite. It’s where all the gargoyles and saint statues intermix. It cracks me up that the two outwardly different figures blend so seamlessly together in stone.
We then saw a sign for ‘Tours de Notre Dame’. This is one of the items that wasn’t originally on our list, but was included on the museum pass, so we decided to add it on. I thought it was a guided tour of the cathedral, but it turned out to be a self-guided expedition to the top of the cathedral and through the bell tower. I could touch the gargoyles! (but I didn’t – Adam said no) That evening, while at the Eiffel Tower, reading the sign ‘Tour de Eiffel’, we realized that ‘tour’ is French for ‘tower’ and that we’d really signed up for the Towers of Notre Dame. It made what we saw much more understandable. Along with shower curtains, add elevators to the list of things the French don’t believe in. Notre Dame, no elevator – 402 steps (mostly up the spiral staircase) to the top; Arc de Triumphe, no elevator – 284 steps (evenly split spiral & normal steps) to the top. Plus you have to come back down both – they prefer you take the stairs and not repel down. The views were totally worth it, but even six days later as I write this, my calves still feel the pain. Coming down the spiral, I started getting dizzy to the point that we had to stop and let others pass us (which was no easy feat in the narrow stairwell). When we made it to the bottom, I needed to sit for awhile to regain stability. Adam suggested that we go back inside the cathedral and sit in a pew. As we sat, the choir began rehearsals for the evening’s Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony. It was surreal to listen to quite angelic Christmas hymns while sitting in Notre Dame.
As we exited the cathedral the second time, we saw signs for the Crypt of Notre Dame and we decided to go visit (mostly because it was starting to rain again and we wanted to spend a little more time in the warm indoors before heading outside again; plus it was covered by our museum pass so why not). It turned out not to be a Crypt like you see in most churches, but rather the archaeological foundations of Paris. Apparently the city of Paris was the island that Notre Dame sits on, so below the cathedral, you can see the old city wall and defence systems. There was very little in the displays translated to English, so it was a bit difficult to fully comprehend what everything was that we were looking at, but it was still neat to walk through.
By this point, it was about 5pm and getting a bit dark. We headed over to the Arc de Triomphe. Wowzers, the metro at evening rush hour. Nothing like an underground railcar with 100,000 of my closest, unwashed, French friends all bundled under 4-5 layers of clothing. The Arc de Triomphe is massive, chunky and quite apparently not to be messed with. We climbed to the top. Any muscle not already screaming in pain from the Notre Dame climbing got it’s turn here. But by 6pm in the heart of evening rush, the theoretically organized chaos that is the Arc’s traffic circle was in full swing. For those unfamiliar, there are 12 streets that converge into this massive roundabout, and there are no pavement markings around the circle to try to create any lanes (probably because nobody would follow them anyway...). There were police cars parked about every three streets all around the circle just waiting for an incident. Though many honking horns and several whistles by the policemen, who apparently know better than to sit in their cars, but rather stand back away from the traffic, there were no traffic accidents for the hour or so we stood atop watching in awe.
From atop the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower looks so light & airy, especially in its evening glow. However, it’s a really, really long way away. We took the metro again – we’re such public transport experts now! We ate dinner near, but not exactly looking at the Eiffel Tower. I loved my meal; Adam was just okay with his. He was a bit bummed – you’re supposed to love the food in Paris, he kept telling me. When we saw the tower up close, Adam for the fourth time that day said, wow that’s really big. It was. Everything he said was big; the Louve, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower. We walked around the base of the Eiffel Tower and watched people.
We didn’t go up. It’s a long story, but I’m waiting to go up to the top with my parents. We’re going to do it someday and I’m not going to have a complete meltdown this time. By then it was nearly 9pm and we were beat. We took the metro back to the hotel and were probably asleep by 10. Night owls we are not. The people around the Moulin Rouge on the street in-front of our room, however, were still going strong at 2:30am.
Saturday morning we headed out to Versailles. All the travel guides warn that it’s really crowded. They’re right. So many tour groups with the guides and their various ‘I’m the leader’ flags followed by a gaggle of tourist snapping pictures of everything and their ear sets to listen to the audio guide as they walk in a huddle mass from room to room. It was a bit overwhelming. The palace is (again) huge. And shinny. (We all know how much I love shinny things!) We walked through the Palace and the Hall of Mirrors. I don’t know that it is as impressive today as it was a couple hundred years ago. The mirrors are anything but high definition and you can see that age has worn them down quite a bit, however the sheer magnitude of them is still impressive.
I would love to go again in the summer to see the gardens. I’ve been twice now, once in mid-October and once in late-November. Both times, the gardens have already been ‘winterized’ – the statues have tarps over them, the flowers are finished blooming and the fountains are turned off. All the same, they are beautiful. I can only imagine how nice they are in the summer time. And the pictures would be of something other than me shivering by the hedges.
So far, hasn’t this sounded like a swimmingly easy trip? No mishaps, everything is going our way. A tourist dream really. Well, you know that had to end. There is no way to go on a vacation without some form of a hiccup. We walked all over Versailles. I mean, ALL OVER. The place is huge. We walked back to the train station, used our tickets to go through the turnstile and walked to the platform. The overhead board said there was a train heading back to Paris in about 10 minutes. About 15 minutes and no train later, we noticed a station employee talking to other tourists waiting and giving some form of directions to which they turned and left the station. Adam walked over to the crowd that was growing to figure out what was going on. There apparently was some disruption on the track and there were going to be no trains to or from that station for another two hours at a minimum. There was, however another station in Versailles that was ‘about a 10 minute walk away’ that still had service into Paris. So we headed out. The first problem was we’d already validated our tickets at this station, so we wouldn’t be able to get into the other station plus we had to validate them to get out of the train station without trains so we wouldn’t be able to get out of whatever station we were going to end up at. The train employee assured us that they were calling the other station in Versailles to let them know about 100 people that were heading their way who would need new tickets and that it wouldn’t be a problem. Off we went. Somehow in the parade of people walking from one station to the next, we ended up behind a group of 4 French soldiers, all of whom were carrying machine guns. We figured we’d let them deal with and troublesome station employees once we got to the other station. We arrived at the next station (it was more than a 10 minute walk), and (SURPRISE!) our tickets wouldn’t work. As the mass of people shuffled to the ticket line to figure out what to do, they opened one of the turnstiles and just let everyone walk through. So we did. We figured it was better not to ask too many question – and we were again tired from all the walking. We took a train into a station that we recognized the name of (and was on our Italian map) and attempted to transfer to the metro to get back to our hotel (your train ticket also allows you to access the metro system). As we went to exit the train, our tickets again wouldn’t work. We looked around for a station employee to help us through, but couldn’t locate anyone. Then we noticed other people from our train jumping the turnstile; we assumed that they were in the same situation we were in, so we jumped the turnstile too. I would have felt more like a rebel if we hadn’t actually legitimately paid for the ticket prior to jumping the gate. On the other side was a station employee who, after some suspicious looks, we were able to explain the situation to & she issued us new metro tickets so we could continue our journey. Overall, not too bad, but our pre-planned one hour journey back from Versailles ended up taking nearly 3.
British beef is not the same as American. It tastes a bit funny to us, so we haven’t been eating much meat – sticking mainly to poultry for protein (don’t worry Mom, most meals are quazi balanced). Earlier in the weekend, we’d walked past a French steakhouse near our hotel and it smelled amazing. We had quickly made plans to return for dinner one night. After our harrowing return journey, we decided a steak was just what we needed. I chose the triple-peppercorn steak with a baked potato and cheese sauce. Adam had a sirloin steak with french fries and bar-b-que sauce. I clearly won the dinner game again. Mine was amazing. I’d eat there again. Adam said his was okay (which isn’t necessarily a bad term in his head—ask anyone who has ever eaten with him), but he wishes he chose my meal instead. I slept better that night that I have in a while. I was really tired and I’d had a great meal. Great combination.
Sunday was our flight back. We had one metro trip ticket left and about 2 hours until we needed to head to the airport, so we packed up our suitcases and went back to the Eiffel Tower to walk around in the daylight. It really is a different place during the day. What looks so light and glowy (that may not actually be a word) at night is a steel force in the day. We sat under the tower and watched other people take pictures of the tower and children play. Adam & I joked that it was a glimpse of what we would be doing in 50 years on our front porch.
After nearly missing our flight home from Barcelona, Adam wanted to ensure we had plenty of time to get to the airport this time. So we headed towards the airport 3 hours prior to flight time. I’m going to go ahead and give away then ending now: we made the flight. We got to the airport in decent time. Unfortunately, I didn’t have boarding passes, so we had to check-in at the airport. The line for the counter looked like it might take a year or two to get through so we walked around to the self-service area. Though the line was shorter, I wouldn’t call it short and to make it better only two of the six machines were working. I feel like there should be two lines for this type of service; one for people who can read instructions and press buttons appropriately and one for people who are just going to annoy me by trying the same thing 4 times in a row and hoping for a different result. Lady, if it wouldn’t let you change your seat the first three times – stop trying. Eventually we made it through and got our passes (I didn’t even bother trying to change seats – I checked to make sure they were on the inside of the plane and took it at that). We then walked to the security line. It was again long when we walked up. Adam guessed about 45 minutes to get through it. We had 90 minutes until our flight. The line crawled. Several people behind us had flight times earlier than ours, so they flagged down an agent and asked if there was anything they could do. She said no. I’m pretty sure they missed their flight because we had 10 minutes to put our belts and coats back on and run to the gate before the flight by the time we got through everything. We however, already had our shoes on, because you don’t have to take them off in Europe – interesting. So, we waited in various lines at the airport for nearly 2 hours for a 55 minute flight. We made it home, picked up the girls from the kennel – they didn’t appear to have missed us – and headed home to eat dinner at 5pm...yep, just like we’re 80.
