Paris Day 2

When we forced ourselves out of bed Saturday morning, we realized that we needed a game plan.  So we decided on the must-sees for our final day.  First we made a pit-stop downstairs for breakfast.

We tried to make some hot chocolate with the Nestle Quick they provided. Mom proposed that European Nestle Quick tastes different than the American kind.  I proposed that French Quick was nasty.  Then we realized that I had made it with water instead of milk. It doesn't matter what continent you're on, chocolate water doesn't taste good.

While we ate, we decided that today, we were going to do more riding and less walking.  If we wanted to survive the rest of our week, we had to do things a little differently.  And since our list of sights weren't exactly next door to each other, the metro was going to be our friend.

Thankfully, with a bit of previous subway riding experience, mostly in Boston, and the set up of the Paris system, it was pretty easy to get around.  Until it wasn't, but that's an end of day experience, so you'll have to read a while to hear about that one.

First we took the train to see the Sacre Coeur.  At each stop, I loved walking up onto the street after being underground, and feeling delightfully surprised at where we had arrived.  We headed up a street with lots of markets.  It was a good mix of regular people stores and touristy stores.

And you know how everyone says that the bread in France is amazing?

It so, totally is.  I have had some very good bread in my life.  But I have never, never eaten bread like I ate in France.  I can't even say what made it so much better, I wish I knew.  Then I might be able to find a way to duplicate it and make myself a very chubby millionaire. People would spend a lot of money for that stuff! At least we would, as evidenced by the fact that we stopped at this stand on the way up to the Sacre Coeur,

 and then after finishing our purchases, actually turned around and walked back for more.

That's them, on the right.


My little buddies, Brioche Au Sucre.

Anyway, after we'd gotten our seconds, we reached the hill where the beautiful church sat.

But you know what we saw?  Not the majestic beauty, not the domes.  We saw the stairs.  The millions of stairs that needed climbing.  We felt go-lucky enough to not only buy two rounds of pastries, we spent a whole metro ticket each to ride the funicular up.

The view from the hill was awesome.  It was the only slightly wet day of our trip.  But I loved the cloudy horizon.

The church was pretty. I can't remember why I didn't take any pictures of the inside, but it was probably either not allowed or just too dark to get much.

From there we wandered through the Montemarte neighborhood.  I loved this part.

There is a square where artists all congregate and make and sell their work.

We tried to stop ourselves from walking into every shop, but there were so many beautiful and enticing window displays.

We walked and walked and walked.

 We knew it was time to move on so we headed for the metro, and resurfaced in another part of town.

We were pleased to see the top of Notre Dame right away, since that's where we wanted to go.

 See it? Right there above my head?  Yeah, that's not really it.

That's Saint Chapelle, which we figured out when we got to it, which was ok cause we wanted to go there too.  It was also very beautiful.  Lots of stained glass.

From there we thought we'd head to the Notre Dame, but were obviously slightly mixed up in our directional orientation.  We wandered/got lost and ended up over the river looking at some other church that was also not Notre Dame.

We headed back the way we came, passed by some more wonderful neighborhoody areas, and were happy to use the now-visible top of Notre Dame as a guiding star.  Unfortunately, when we got there we realized that it still wasn't Notre Dame, it was Saint Chapelle again.

Seriously, if you look on a map, they are not that far apart, so I don't know what exactly happened to us.  An alternate force wanted to be sure that we got in all the extra walking we were trying to avoid.

But alas, we finally found it.  Notre Dame.

 I was pretty excited to see this church because of the study required of it in my Art History class.  It was cool and I recalled some things from my class.  But we were so tired.
My mom said, "These churches we've seen today are nice, but wait til you get to Italy."  I wouldn't know what she meant for another day, but she was right.

We shuffled on through it, taking in what we could and trying to remain upright.  Time and walking was taking it's toll again.  We couldn't make it out without sitting on a pew.  And we sat and stared at each other just as we had at the Louvre the day before.

We were so tired.  I think I could type that about a thousand times and it would still be accurate.  My hair hurt.  It was turning into late afternoon and we weren't sure where we should go next. I'm sure our fatigued minds played into our decision, and even though things got a little sketchy from there, I don't regret our split- second decision to squeeze a minimum half day trip to Versailles into a two hour window.  The idea of riding on the train for 35 minutes may have had a little something to do with it too.

We left so quick to find a metro station that hooked up with a train station, that I didn't get any pictures of the flying buttresses!

 At the station, I knew where we needed to go.  We got our tickets, but as we waited on the platform, I also knew we were messed up.  I could tell that this train was going to take us to Versailles, but not to the station we needed to go to.  I stared at the posted map and could not for the life of me, figure out how to fix our trouble.  We let one train go on without us as we stared at the map.

When the next train finally came, I felt like I had no choice but to get on and see if the map posted inside would give me any more clues.  Luckily a nice guy was standing right by the door and the map.  We hopped on and I put my finger on the dot of the station we needed saying, "We want to go here! How do we get here?"

He told me we were on the wrong train.

He told me where this train was going.

He said we needed a different train.

He told me we actually needed the train on the other side of the track,  (I still can't figure out how we were supposed to know that based on the map), but just as he spoke his last word, the bell chimed and the doors began to shut.  I did my best to be Superman and pry them open, but I actually just got stuck and that nice guy did his second good turn of the day and freed me from their grip, but unfortunately we were headed in the wrong direction on the wrong train.

It wasn't too hard to get off at the next stop and turn ourselves around.  But we lost valuable time.  The palace closed at 5pm.  We had left the Notre Dame around 3 something.  We knew we wouldn't have much time in the palace to begin with, but now we weren't even sure we'd make it in at all.

And we didn't.  We enjoyed the not-walking part of riding the train as well as the views, but as soon as we got to Versailles, we had to put the pedal to the metal.  The attendant locked the entrance door in our face but pointed us around to the side where we could at least enjoy the grounds which were open for another half hour.

That place is big.

So big.

The grounds were really big too.

And beautiful.

I loved it.  We couldn't go far because of our time and leg constraints.  But I saw enough to know that I loved it.  My next trip to Paris with include Versailles for sure.  And I'm going inside.

It was really a happy accident.  We walked through the town.  And had dinner in a nice little restaurant.  I ate the entire basket of bread by myself. At least my mom was with me to make it look like we had shared.

Because of our wanderings, we had a ways to go to get back to the train station.  But we made it.  We rested on the train again.  And by the time we got back to our stop we really wanted a treat before we went to bed.  So we walked down this street and then down that one.  Over here and over there. But things were mostly closed.  And we weren't up for going in to sit down and try to communicate with people so we walked more.  All the while we kept saying how tired we were of walking.  Finally we gave up and went back to our hotel empty handed.

We laid down on the beds, mentally prepping ourselves for the 4:30am wake up call that awaited us for our travels to Venice the next morning.

Only a few days later, we would be able to say with conviction that Paris was an amazing and beautiful city that neither one of us could wait to return to, but that night, in the dark, I said to my mom,

"So...Paris? What did you think?"

There was a slight pause and then she said, "Well, I think I had fun."

And I suddenly realized that I knew exactly what she meant.