Paris Revisited

Travels

This is a long overdue post and I probably forgot about some of the stuff we did, but here is my recollection of our last visit to Paris during my folk’s trip out here.

What can we say? It’s a great place. A nice set of circumstances allowed us to forgo another tiny European hotel room and instead stay in an apartment of one of Chizzy’s coworkers who was out of town for the weekend. We were debating the train vs. taxi for the airport to city leg until the final minute, but finally decided on booking a ride with the company Chizzy has used before for work traveling. The train can be worth taking for the experience if you don’t have a ton of bags, but it was nice to travel in comfort into Paris this time. The apartment was in the Trocadero area which left us a bit outside the action, but a quick stop at a Metro ticket booth (and a fine display of Chizzy’s French skills) solved that problem. The trains seemed much cleaner to me on this trip. I don’t know if it was my imagination but I thought it maybe had something to do with the Olympic selection committee recently having been in town. Who knows? The one thing I freely admit though is that the Metro/RER system confuses me quite a bit. And forget about taking a bus unless you have explicit directions, because the maps and timetables at the stops themselves are impossible to decipher. So, we weren’t riding the system like veterans, but it certainly got us to where we needed to be. First stop, Arc de Triomphe. We actually hit it at a time where we could climb the mug.

The security did seem tight at the monument and we soon found out why as the Champs-Elysees was temporarily shut down to make way for this procession. Not exactly sure what the event was, but it probably had to do with cheese or wine or sponge bathing.

Never had occasion to head to this part of the city on any of our trips. This is the closest thing to an American looking city I have seen over here.

We then walked down the street to the Concorde thingy and saw some fountains.

I think we then took a train back to the Eiffel Tower, but I don’t have a single picture of use being up there this time. Strange.

Anywhoo, the next morning we set out for St. Chapelle to check out the stained glass. It was very cool, but in my hands a camera is pretty much useless in these places. Imagine 270 degrees of stuff similar to this.

The outside of St. Chapelle, which was originally built to house the relics from the crucifixion of Jesus. That would have been something to see.

Then we crossed the street to Notre Dame and checked that guy out. I think the back is cooler looking than the front.

Then we walked around for quite a while through the St. Germain neighborhood and ended up at St. Sulpice. There was a freaking wedding going on in there and we decided to crash it. Instead of being long lost relatives though, we just said we were the wedding photographers.

We made plans with another of Chizzy’s coworkers to be taken to a real French restaurant for the evening. I don’t have a single photograph of this evening, but it was truly an authentic French restaurant called Mallard that had been around for over 100 years. It was the kind of place we never would have set foot into without a local so we considered ourselves very lucky to have to opportunity to experience authentic French cuisine. Chizzy just did work gossip during the meal, but the folks and I got to discuss the French legal system with coworker-husband. It was very interesting to hear about some of the differences in the legal system from a true Parisian lawyer. The waiters did seem pretty stuffy, but our hosts knew how to play the game very well and even got a few laughs out of them. Everybody tried to be adventurous with the meal and snails were consumed. Once again, the meal did absolutely nothing to convince me that French food isn’t completely overrated.

After dinner, the 6 of us piled into a minivan and were given a complete tour of the city. It was dark out, but the tour was very comprehensive and we went into a lot of areas we hadn’t seen before. We, of course, commented on the crazy driving habits in Paris so the dude decided to show off and head directly to the circle at the Arc de Triomphe and unabashedly cut off as many people as he could. It was cool. The tour was nice, but I seriously question anything the guy said during the drive. The first mistake he made was correcting me when I commented that Napolean’s tomb was in Invalides. He claimed the body was in the Pantheon. The other mistake, which I thought was much stranger, was when he drove under some tiny little underpass and told us it was the spot where Princess Diana died. Anybody who has ever seen footage of the accident knows it was in a larger tunnel with big pillars. We may never know if he really thought that is where she died or if he was just trying to humor the tourists.

My mom had come down with whatever was ailing me on the Rome trip and everybody was pretty tired at this stage of the vacation. So the last day there, we set our goals low and decided to only do one thing. This is what we did.

Later