And On The Left You Will See… My House

Now we have been in Paris for a couple days and I am having a wonderful time. I had a bit of difficultly adjusting since I know only a few key phrases in French, that coming from a place where I could basically communicate if I was lost or ordering in a restaurant was difficult. Although according to the internets i.e. facebook people really seem to like Paris over Madrid, since it got “liked” five times and Madrid got zero. I can’t really say which city I like better yet but I think Madrid will always have a place in my heart since I can (to some extent) speak the local language.

Annnyway we arrived at the Madrid airport with plenty of time to spare from our hotel. At this point it was just my mom and I because my dad had taken an earlier flight back to the States through London. For all of us who don’t have to get back to work, we were off for 8 days in Paris. Unfortunately something I ate disagreed me so I was making a lot of bathroom trips, but by the time I got to Paris I was feeling much better. (I’m thinking it was the salad at the Prado, it had a lot of shellfish in it.) We were actually flying through Olry instead of Charles Degal so it was much easier for us to navigate except for the fact that they only had one carousel for our section of the airport so there were several flights on one carousel and so we had to wait in this huge crowd for our bags, which thankfully both arrived. I think our French would be severely stretched if we lost our bags.

We took a cab to our hotel, which our cab driver did not know, so that made mom a little nervous but I was frantically trying to pick up some phrases from the book, so I was not really aware of it. The hotel is in a great location, very close to the Louve and other cultural sites but not directly on the busy street. One thing that was new for me is that when we leave the hotel we leave the key at the front desk. Our room it tiny, about half the size of my double at Dickinson in Goodyear, so there is basically room for the two single beds, a small closest and the bedside tables. The bathroom is very nice, but now we have a leak from the ceiling, so that is a little unfortunate. When we first got here I was just feeling under the weather from being sick and nervous and Mom suggested that we go out and get some dinner, which actually helped quite a bit. Thankfully the menu had an English translation and we sat outside, bumping elbows with other tourists and Parisians (literally, the tables outside are ridiculously close together). I got roasted chicken with lightly fried zucchini and a tower type salad with tomato, eggplant and cheese and a bit of lettuce at the top. It was delicious and just what I needed. Then we went for a bit of a walk around our neighborhood and saw all the shops and cafes that were close to us. We also stopped in a small grocery store and got some cheese, fruit and crackers, which was perfect for breakfast and lunch. Unfortunately once we got back into the room we’ve noticed that there was a sign that said “no outside food or drink in the room” even though we have a mini bar in the room. So while we are in the room we store stuff in the fridge but when we go out we hide stuff in our suitcases and under our clothes and secretly sneak out our garbage in tote bags. We feel very silly about it all, but the city is so expensive and this is a really cheap easy way to eat before we go out. Now we probably eat out one meal at a time and the rest we just snack it out.

The next day we woke up kind of later than we wanted and we decided to do the historic walk of Paris that was outlined in our guidebook (Rick Steve’s). It was amazing especially since we downloaded a free podcast guide to the walk, which was a lot of information about plazas and the streets itself that you never really have an audio guide for. The day started kind of slow because we didn’t really know where we were going, so we slowly walked along looking for a metro stop. We eventually found a metro stop but then it took us another fifteen minutes to by metro tickets, only to realize that we were close enough to walk to our first place on the tour, so that seemed kind of silly but it was good to get oriented.

We started this part of the day at Norte Dame and by the time we got there it was around mid-day. We got museum passes for four days, which means that we basically are covered for all the major museums that we go to and we can use the group entrance, which means shorter lines. It also is for some more obscure museums like the post office and stamp museum and the ceramics museum (both of which I would like to go to but I don’t think my Mother would be interested in the stamp museum and the ceramics museum is outside of Paris and would be difficult for us to get to). Notre Dame was amazing of course both inside the cathedral and then the view from the tower. Only I went up in the tower because my Mom saw it last time she came and there was a long wait and it was a pretty tight area and sometimes we both get claustrophobic. Even at the end of the hike up the stairs I was getting a little freaked out because the stairs really narrow and they feel like they go on forever. But it was totally worth it to see the views, the gargoyles and statues and the bell. That took a really long time to the point where Mom started worrying about me but there was no where else for me really to go. Afterwards we sat outside and ate a little snack that we brought including yogurt and almonds under the statue of Charlemagne and it was perfect. We then saw point zero which was the center of France and was the center of Paris thousands of years ago.

After Notre Dame we went to the Deportation Memorial, which was for the 200,000 people who were deported during World War II by the Nazis. It was really stark and grim; the architect built it so the only thing you could see was the sky and the sea. Paris really disappears when you enter into the memorial and then there is an internal part with 200,000-lit crystals and an eternal frame.

We then walked along the left bank of the river and looked at all the people selling used books and by the St. Julien-le-Pauvre, which has some middle age houses around it. Our next stop was The Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, which is a famous English second hand bookstore, which many famous writers visited while they lived in Paris like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Erza Pound. We walked through the Latin Quarter, which was named after the intellectuals who communicated in Latin at the University of Paris. We walked past two squares, St. Michel, where there is a statue of St. Michel fighting a demon, and many students and political uprising happened there and St. André-des-Arts.

We had two more stops along our walk. My favorite place that we went was Sainte-Chapelle, which was built by Louis III to house the “true” crown of thorns. It was pretty small but the second floor was basically full of stain glass windows and it was awe-inspiring. Lastly we went to the Conciergerie, which was the famous prison where people were kept before they were guillotine and they had a replica of Marie Antoinette’s cell. By this time we were totally exhausted so we crossed the Seine and headed home for a nap.
We got up and went down the block to another little café close to our hotel. It was a very nice leisurely dinner which Mom and I spent people watching and commenting on how nice (or not so nicely people were dressed). I got quiche de jour with tuna and mom got a shrimp Cesar salad. After dinner we went back to Pont Nour the bridge and we took a nighttime sight seeing cruise. At this time it was about 10:30 and so it was getting pretty dark so some of the photos we took didn’t really turn out but it was a very relaxing way to see the sights because we didn’t have to worry about navigation. It was also a good way to orient around the city. Our tour guide spoke in both French and English but her English was really hard to understand but she did point out her house on the tour (hence the title of my post).

There is some stuff I missed here in my blog- my last couple days in Malaga, Toledo and Madrid, but I will get to those soon!