MY BOGGY BLOG: find your way through the murk

PARIS, DAY 4 AND 5

(If you want to read the Paris trip in order, scroll down to previous entries first.)

On Thursday, it was time to pack up and move to our other hotel for the stay. I hadn't been able to find 5 consecutive nights in a hotel for us, so we had to change. At the Grande Hotel Magenta near Montmartre area, we would all 5 be able to stay in one room. However, this was a much busier, less safe area of town, very close to Gare du Nord (a train station) and a hospital, so we got to hear ambulance sirens frequently throughout our stay. It did have more room at this hotel, though the rooms were dingey and old and worn out. There was a room with a double bed and single bed, another room with a double bed, and a roomy bathroom.

After settling in and finding a parking garage where the van could be safe (we won't mention the heroin addicts shooting up in the stairwell, will we?), we headed off for the Picasso Museum. I was thinking that this might be a refreshing change from seeing all the classical paintings at the Louvre the previous day, getting to see the span of artwork throughout the life of a very experimental artist. (D of course dubbed it all Boring. Well, maybe someday he'll appreciate having seen such things.) I enjoyed it all, and came away with a real sense of Picasso's playfulness. Artist Daughter G came away from 2 days of art wanting to go home and work on her own art. Yay!

We decided to walk from the museum to Notre Dame, even though it would be a jaunt. It seemed preferable to walk a ways than to run down to the metro and climb stairs and wander hallways and wait for trains. We found some fascinating windy little streets with some fun shops. The boys all tolerated the girls going into a jewelry store and buying some Paris earrings (yay, I found some!). Thank you boys!

We arrived at Notre Dame, unfortunately too late to actually climb the towers and see the gargoyles up close. B and I had done this on our last trip, and the kids would have liked it. We didn't realiye the tower visits close up so early. We did get to walk around inside the cathedral though, and this is my favorite fo the Paris churches. There is so much to see inside, and everything is on such a grand scale. Statues of saints and religious icons everywhere, colorul stained glass, a forrest of pillars, neck-craning arches to gaze up at. And because of the Hunchback of Notre Dame movie, the kids knew about Notre Dame, so even D who called every old thing boring enjoyed seeing this church!

I had seen in an online Paris guide a mention of a must-visit cafe to get ice cream from by Notre Dame. We asked an English speaking guard at Notre Dame, and she pointed the way to Berthillion. It was just across a little bridge, right by the Seine River. We got our ice cream, various flavors of chocolate for most of us, and It Was Really Really Good. There were certain bass notes to this ice cream, a thickness and a depth you don't find in ordinary ice cream. We sat on steps by the Seine and savored the moment. The kids had fun feeding bits of cone to little birds that they eventually got to fly up and pluck the cone off their outstretched fingers.

We went back to our hotel after this, then went out for pizza at a nearby restaurant for dinner. Instead of the brusque manners we've found from some German and French waiters and waitresses, here we were welcomed in enthusiastically by a darker-skinned French maitre d'. He seemed to love speaking English with us, and helped us order from the waitress who spoke only French and Spanish. The pizza was great (thin salami, which seems to be the equivalent of pepperoni, with an egg in the middle of the pizza). The maitre d' chatted with us a bit about America and our trip-- he claimed to love our president, even though we said we didn't!

DAY 5

Our last day in Paris was a trip to Versailles, which I guess is technicallly outside of Paris. It was tricky to figure out how to get there-- you had to buy special tickets for some train that traveled outside the metro area. After some hits and misses we got on the right train.

Again our museum passe came in handy, allowing us to skip the longer lines to get in. We shelled out the $30 for the English audio guides and it ended up being worth it-- I think we all got a lot more out of the castle and its contents in getting to hear the stories and factual information about the rooms.

Everry room in this palace is sooooo elaborate, with painting on the ceilings and gold gilding everywhere, mirrors and enormous portraits and statues everywhere. I especially enjoyed the long hall of kings when we first went in, which is a long pale hallway with a white statue every few feet on one side, each one of a king or queen of france, dating back to the 700s AD. I also liked the opera hall that King Louis XV had built. It was all a soft blue with gold trimming. Unfortunately, it was one of the rooms where photography wasn't allowed.

The crowds at Versailles were not much fun. Some of the rooms were small, and it seems like every other tourist isn't satisfied at any famous sight in Paris to just take a picture of the famous object--- no, you must take a photo of your friend/child/spouse/whatever standing next to the famous object, and this makes it difficult for anyone else who is trying to get a picture. Why is this? Must they prove that they were there, smiling and posing next to the object? Obviously, I'm just a take-a-picture-of-the-object type!

After about 2 hours touring the rooms, we went outside to find bathrooms. While the palace of Versailles is splendidly royal, the bathrooms are not. Especially for women. You had to wait in line for 15 minutes outside to use one of the smelly 4 stalls. Of course it decided to rain just when G and I had gotten up to be 4th in line. Everyone else had raincoats and umbrellas (we had put our coats in a backpack that we'd checked at the museum entrance), so the heavy downpour got us. We waited, and after we were pretty drenched a nice man waiting for his wife came and stood next to us, sharing his umbrella. We were grateful!

The storm didn't last too long, and then we toured the gardens at Versailles. They seem to go on forever in three different directions, with sculpted shrubbery and trees, numerous fountains, flowers, statues. We walked around until we were too tired to move and then plunked down on some marble steps to just enjoy the views.

As we left Versailles, we walked slowly over the long cobblestone walkway to go back toward the train station. Versailles had what we ended up calling Wobblestones-- cobblestones that have larger rounded rocks that make it so you have to watch your step constantly to make sure you know where you are putting your foot. I've seen women walking around Paris in flip flops and in high heels, and I can't imagine how those wearing such foot gear could even manage a bit of the Wobblestones walkway.

Before leaving, we ate at a McDonald's in a mall by the train station. This is the first time we'd eaten in one here, and the kids were happy. It was all so, dare I say, comfortingly familiar? And the Big Mac, fries and Coke were filling and tasty. It was nice to order and know what you were getting, which is not usually the case when eating out while traveling. B decided to order anything he couldn't get at an American McDs-- beer and a cocoa crispie bar. The beer came in a malt cup! During lunch we struck up a conversation with a British family visiting a friend in Paris. We had a good chat, talking about traveling and where we were going and how they'd loved New York when they'd been there.

We had a few extra metro tickets, so we used them up by surprising D with another trip to the carnival at the Tuillieries. He was so happy, and had a good time running around and playing.

After this it was back to the hotel to rest and pack, our last night in Paris. In the morning, we grabbed one last breakfast from a sidewalk bakery and retrieved our van and we were off for Germany again. It had been a full week!

Posted by sapphire at August 22, 2006 09:04 AM