Weekend in Paris

Travels

February 18, 2005 07:38 PM

Last weekend we took the long overdue step and spent more than a few hours in Paris. We found a nice little hotel online and booked two nights near the Eiffel Tower. We knew it wasn’t going to be a real central location to some of the more active areas but we knew we would hit them all. The Hotel Eber Mars was very close to Rue Cler which is a famous little market street and we stopped there for a drink the first night and a crepe the morning we left. Of the areas we hit, we both agree St. Germain (Latin quarter) and the Marais were the two coolest areas. We never did get up to Montparnasse area.

The churches are very cool. Notre Dame and St. Sulpice were highlights with their amazing architecture, displays of stained glass and eerie crypts. St. Sulpice actually had a written clarification about the line running across the floor. I guess the book The Da Vinci Code took some liberties about the history of the church and they didn’t seem too pleased about it. We paid the modest fare to climb the tight spiral staircase at Notre Dame to hang out amongst the gargoyles. That was very cool. Never eat at the cafes across the street from Notre Dame unless you enjoy paying $10 for a pint of Carlsberg or $6 for a little glass of iced tea.

Back of Notre Dame

The first night we had a great memorable dinner at a Russian restaurant in our hotel neighborhood of Champs de Mars. We figured we’d do better with the language issue if we went there since Russian is one of the two languages we actually speak. By ‘we’ I mean Chiz. The food was amazing and we were treated well because of Chizzy’s language skills. There was a three piece band moving between the two level dining area playing traditional music and generally lifting the spirits of everybody there. I finally was introduced to borscht as it was meant to be and we re-vowed to make Russia a stop while we are out here.

On Saturday we hooked up with a couple from Queen Anne that Chiz met when she was doing Bridal Boot Camp. They own the fitness studio and the woman, Brook, was a year behind Chiz in the same high school in Auburn. We walked all day long and hit many of the major attractions. They were generally up for anything but were pretty jet lagged and wanted to find a Starbucks for a caffeine fix. Thankfully, we couldn’t find one and Chiz and I convinced them to do coffee French style and sit out at a café. I think they are happy they did it. We tried to slow the pace down toward the end of the afternoon by checking out the Musee d’Orsay but they weren’t open very late and we wouldn’t have had much time to art it up. We did dinner at an Italian restaurant that evening in the Marais where they were staying and that was also very good. We left them around 10pm because we still had to get all the way back across the city and didn’t want to be stuck after bus hours.

As we started walking though we realized some of her co-workers might be out in the city so we called them and found ourselves in a Canadian bar in St. Germain a half hour later. The party was just getting going as it was one of her co-worker’s birthday and we followed them to the Scottish bar a few blocks away. We met up with some Canadians and generally had a great time. As we stumbled out, bus time was long gone and we had to walk all the way back to Champ de Mars on blistered feet. The taxi situation in Paris is very strange and we didn’t have the energy to figure it out. We hatched a drunken plan that if we were approached by any shady characters I would fight them off as Chiz ran off screaming. Of course we didn’t see any shady characters.

Crazy canadians, Mike the co-worker, and a happy Chiz

It was a quick weekend but we finally feel like we got a good idea what Paris is all about. There is still a ton we didn’t do and we never even set foot in a museum. Hopefully we will get back there soon.

Comments (4)