9/11/14 Our Last Full Day in France - Giverny

Hard to believe, but our two weeks in Paris has flashed by. Today was our last full day.

The plan was to take the train to Giverny to visit Claude Monet's house and gardens, and the Impressionists museum. Getting there wasn't quite as simple as getting to Versailles. It required taking the Metro to Gare Saint Lazare and taking a regional train to the town of Vernon. And THEN taking a shuttle bus to Giverny.

But we were having problems with the room's safe and we couldn't call the safe repair guy until 9:00 a.m. He fixed the safe in just a few minutes, but as a result we weren't able to leave until after 9:30. We knew there was a train at 10:18 a.m. - we hoped we could make it.

We missed it by about 3 minutes. At the ticket counter, the guy said the next train wasn't till 12:18 p.m. - but I had seen an 11:09 a.m. train on the online train schedule. That train would require a transfer. No problem.

We successfully navigated the trains (including the transfer) and arrived in Vernon at about 12:20. The information I had about the shuttle bus said that the bus' arrival at the bus stop is synchronized to the arrival of the train at the station. What this really meant was that it's synchronized to the arrival of the non-stop trains from St. Lazare. There was no bus waiting for us, because we had taken the train with the transfer. The next bus wouldn't show up for another hour.

So we took a taxi instead.

We bought a combo-ticket for the House-gardens and the museum. We grabbed lunch first, then entered the gardens - we figured that the garden wouldn't take that long leaving more time for the museum. We needed to make sure we were on a train to get us back to Paris in time for our dinner reservations at 7:30.

The gardens are lovely and quite extensive. But of course everybody headed to the water garden to see the lily pond:

There were high school students all over the place with their sketch pads, drawing the lillies.

Lots of beautiful shots:

After the water garden, we toured the first floor of the house. The walls of the living room were filled with Monet's paintings, many I've never seen or heard of before.

Then we walked over to the museum. Which turned out to be one floor and one room. All of the artists were Impressionists, but few of the paintings were by Monet. The entire museum, walking slowly, took us less than  30 minutes. 

We were done.

We had to ask a few times, but we finally found the bus stop at about 3:00. We figured we could catch the 3:15 shuttle and then catch the next train back to Paris, leaving us time before dinner.

Except that when we arrived back in Vernon, turned out the next train to Paris wasn't for another hour and 15 minutes. There wasn't even the alternative of taking a train with a transfer. If we had realized this, we would have spent more time in Giverny - there were shops and such we could have looked at. Not much, but something else to see.

In the meantime, we sat on a bench and waited. Good thing I have a book downloaded to the kindle app on my iPad.

When we arrived back at the train station, rush hour was in full swing. Navigating through it was a game of frogger - rivers of people running and running and running to the their trains. It was a zoo - I don't think I've ever seen Penn Station quite this insane. We were the only ones NOT in a hurry and basically, we got in their way.

In between the train station and the Metro station, we stopped for a couple of minutes to listen to a string orchestra (must have been about 10 instruments) - they were fabulous!

Sadly enough, tonight was our last dinner in Paris. We went to Le Christine, just a couple of blocks from the hotel. For the first time, we ordered 3 courses (starter + plat + dessert). Andy had pan fried chanterelle mushrooms, and I had some tomato and cheese thing. Both were fantastic. The main courses: Andy had beef filet and I had sea bass. For dessert, Andy had the chocolate fondant with mint sorbet and mint cookie. I don't do mint, so I went for the cheesecake instead. More like cream cheese, it did sit on a cinammon graham cracker, which was sitting on strawberry goo. YUMMMMMM....(even if it wasn't chocolate).

By far the best food vacation ever, topping all of the great meals we had on all our cruises.

All's that's left is to pack up tomorrow, have one more scrumptious lunch somewhere and be back by 1:00 p.m. to be picked up by the shuttle to take us to the airport.

The only way I can cheer myself up when a vacation ends is start thinking about the next one.

What will be Amy and Andy's Excellent Adventure for 2015? Stay tuned.....

9/10/14 A Bit of a Wash

No, it didn't rain today - the weather is still fantastic (lower 70s and sunny). Things just didn't work out as planned or hoped.

First, the photo for the thumbnail:

From the top of Notre Dame, a gargoyle looks over Paris. He seems to be giving the Evil Eye to the Eiffel Tower.

The original plan for this morning was to visit the Palais Garnier  - the old opera house that, in theory, inspired the story for "The Phantom Of The Opera". According to the Rick Steve's travel guide (albeit 2013 -- I didn't think much would have changed other than prices), the Palais Garnier was included in the museum pass we bought. 

Took about 30 minutes to walk there:

When we got inside, the guard said the museum pass does NOT apply. It's 10 euro for a ticket, and the next English tour is at 2:30. Way too late. We asked if we could go in without a tour - which was a different ticket line. Then we saw the sign that the theater/auditorium was closed due to rehearsals. Seemed kinda silly to pay the fee and not be able to see the auditorium, so we left.

So now what? We thought we might try to see the catacombs, though the catacombs' website warned about long lines. It was also a very long walk - over an hour. Taking the train had us doing crazy things - take this to there, leave the station, take another train from there to here....We decided to take a cab.

When we arrived at the catacombs, the line was indeed very long. We asked the guard at the head of the line and he said the line was running about 2 hours long. It was now 12:30. We decided to go to lunch instead.

Over lunch (I had a "smoked salmon" salad - really good lox!), we reviewed our options. Before we left the hotel we had asked the front desk for suggestions for finding the kind of shopping we like to do - local artists/artisans/crafts people. The front desk person suggested Montmartre - but we thought we had been there the day we toured Sacre Coeure, and it didn't look very attractive. 

Apparently we were in the wrong place. We need to be BEHIND the church up at the top of the hill. She gave us directions to a Metro stop that was located almost at the top of The Hill (but at the bottom of The Steps). We decided to take a chance.

The French have a reputation for being grumpy and rude specifically to Americans, refusing to speak English and refusing to try to understand our attempts at speaking French. We have not found that to be true, for the most part. We have come across stereotypically grumpy people, but 99% of the time, they have been gracious and helpful.

For example, we were changing trains and standing at an intersection between two lines. We couldn't match the signs on the walls with the labels on the subway map. A woman stopped and asked where we were trying to go - and we told her, we're looking for the Abesses stop on line #12. She then figured out what the confusion was and walked with us to the correct hallway to take us to the correct train. She insisted on helping us, above and beyond. It was awesome.

Then, when we got off at the Abesses stop, there was more confusion as to how to exit the station to take us to the funicular (shuttle train) to take us to the top of the Sacre Coeure hill. A young man explained that we reallly really should take the elevator to the subway exit, because otherwise we would be climbing several flights of stairs. He showed us the elevator - no button to push; we just waited for it to show up. 

When we exited the elevator and then (of course) climbed another flight of stairs to get to the street, he showed us the direction to the funicular. Just awesome. Again. Spontaneous niceness. Random act of kindness.

And so we did find the funicular, which took us to Sacre Coeure. And behind the church was - a little market with street artists selling their work. At last!

We ended up buying two watercolors from one artist (slight discount for buying two). Success at last!

Yey! We would have been a bit disappointed if we had come home without one piece of art. Unheard of! Can't happen!

We decided to make one last attempt at Notre Dame - since it was bright and sunny, Andy would be able to get better photos. And now we have a museum pass again, so the tower is included. And I could visit the treasury.

We made it to Notre Dame with an hour to spare. Andy got into the line (30 minute wait) and I went into the cathedral.

To find out that the treasury is NOT included in the museum pass. Oh my goodness gracious.

I waited outside for Andy to go up and come down. Eventually it occurred to me I could just go back to the hotel room and wait there, too. The photo at the top of the blog is one of many great photos - with a clear sky and fantastic visibility.

We had dinner at one of the restuarants recommended by the front desk. I had "south west duck" (south west of what? France?) - which was phenominal. Andy had steak. 

For dessert I had something called "bitter spicy chocolate cakes with smoked pear sorbet". I think "bitter chocolate" is actually "dark chocolate" - it was certainly dark and it certainly was NOT bitter. YUMMMM.

Andy had something called a "baba" - a pastry made with - what? The server had a hard time explaining it to us, because she kept saying it was made with "hum" - "hum"?? - until she showed us the bottle of RUM. And it had cherries. Awesome.

One more full day in France - tomorrow we are off to Giverny. We are doing this on our own, no bus tour. This will be interesting - we will need to take the subway to a bigger train station, take the train to Giverny then find the bus to Monet's gardens.

Tomorrow: Giverny, The Adventure!

9/9/14 Racking up the Museums

Scheduled for today was the Rodin Museum and then...anything else we could squeeze in for the rest of the day.

Took about 40 minutes to walk there from our hotel; the subway ride would have been about a half hour and require climbing up and down lots of stairs. One of my goals for today was to avoid stairs unless absolutely necessary, in response to yesterday's Stairs Extravaganza.

We bought our new 4-day passes. The audio-guide was not included, so we opted out. We figured the brochure should be enough.

Then we found out that they had no brochures in English. No clue why. Mind boggling. 

So instead, I took the brochure in Spanish and Andy took the one in French. We figured between the two we should be able to make two.

It was a spectacular day for walking in the garden - with our Spanish and French brochures. First Important Thing was the enlarged version of The Thinker - which is "El Pensador" in Spanish. From now one, every time I see an image of that statue I will think "El Pensador!".

Anyway, in about 5 minutes we realized that the Spanish/French thing wasn't going to work. Batting zero, we rented the audio guides.

In hind-sight, we realized we should have toured the exhibits inside the house/museum before the garden. But no suggestion was made (might have been in the brochure, but it would have been in Spanish or French), so we toured the garden first.

Wandering around the garden in search of audio-tagged items, I was suddenly brutally attacked by a vicious chestnut tree. Yes, it fired projectiles right at me. Here's the evidence:

No joke: this chestnut hit me in the face - and bounced off my sunglasses. Would have hit me straight in the eye otherwise. Felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz when the trees flung their apples at her.

There were very few items in the garden that were tagged for the audio guide. The ones that were tagged had explanations that seemed to assume some kind of prior knowledge of some other piece. Like this one, called "Meditation":

Wow what an awkward position for meditating. Turns out this is a stand alone piece from one of Rodin's greatest works called "Hell's Gate"

So maybe we should have started here and some of the other pieces elsewhere in the garden would have been familiar.

Once inside the inside exhibits, lots and lots of items were tagged for the audio guide. Many of the pieces were studies for Hell's Gate and therefore for the stand alone pieces we saw in the garden. Things fell into place and made sense. Perhaps it SHOULD be suggested to tour the house first.

You can see "The Thinker" at the top of the Hell's Gate. Rodin pulled him out and made him into a stand alone piece:

This one should look familiar as well:

Known as "The Kiss", apparently it originated somewhere on Hell's Gate as a pair of doomed/adulterous lovers.

We were done with the exhibits about 1:00 - took us maybe 3 hours to tour the whole museum. We decided to have lunch in the museum cafeteria, because we hadn't seen any cafes on the way over in the morning. Lunch was disappointing. Even the gelato was a bit disappointing, which is really hard to do.

And the instant we left the museum grounds, of course we spotted a cafe across the street. Never mind.

Next on the agenda: the Museum of the Army. Not that French military history is all that alluring (after 10 days of hearing about assorted kings, revolutions, empires, more kings, more revolutions....yeah, not so enthused), but it's housed in a building that was a church and then a hospital. And also somewhere in there is Napoleon's tomb. 

Our handy museum passes in hand, we walk into the ticket office. Andy goes up to the information desk and asks for a map of the museum. Ms. Charming Information Person, snaps: "you have to have a ticket!" And Andy says, "We have tickets - we have a museum pass". WIth great non-enthusiasm, we now have a map. 

We sat on a bench looking at the map and I noticed that nowhere is there a little bathroom logo (I bet you were just waiting for the bathroom story, weren't you?). So we go back up to the Information Desk. Mind you, it's been a few minutes since we were last there, and we'd seen the information person smile and be very pleasant to other people as they ask their questions. Now we're back, and we ask: "Where are the bathrooms?" The answer:

"You have to have a ticket!"

Yes, yes, WE HAVE A MUSEUM PASS, where are the bathrooms?

In a rather brusk fashion, she circles one of the halls on the map and says: "It's in here, down the stairs".

Sensing that she'd rather be doing anything else than answer any more of our questions, we continue into the exhibits.

The first one was a huge collection of armor. My favorite is this guy:

This seriously looks like the Evil Donald Duck who lives in the Alternate Universe on the other side of a mal-functioning transporter.

Next exhibit was the actual "Museum of the Army". Maybe. The basement floor is all about Charles de Gaul ("SHAHdegoh", all one word slurred together). Oh look, there's the bathrooms down there, too. The next 4 floors going up contain the rest of the French military history. Oh look, there's an elevator! Great!

Oh look, the elevator is out of order. Which means to view the upstairs exhibits means climbing 4 flights of stairs. Yeah. No. Not THAT into French military history.

Andy goes up to the exhibits with my iPad in tow to take pictures, while I navigate the stairs down to the bathroom. And then find a place to put myself for a while. 

Andy comes back with this neat relief map ordered by Louis XVI:

This map is original, which means it's over 200 years old. 

Navigating around the construction that seems to be everywhere in this museum, we find the part of the building that was/is the oringal church (the oringal purpose for this building). Take a look:

Quite beautiful - if you look closely at the altar, it is clear glass. On the other side is the room where Napoleon's  tomb is located.

Therefore, next stop is Napoleon's tomb - we had to go outside, around the corner, stand in a line, and show the museum pass. Normally when we show the museum pass, we are waved in - this time the guard marked our passes with a "D". We have no idea what this means.

Anyway, Napoleon's tomb is obviously the big attraction, because there's tons of people everywhere. And here he is:

Ok, so now it's 4:00 and we're done with two museums. Hmm....

We decided to walk in the direction of a recommended restaurant (La Coupola) in Montparnasse. We take our time. We take breaks. We walk slowly. Really slowly. We stop at an ATM and take out money. And take another break.

We arrived at the restaurant at 5:15. A bit early for dinner, so we camped out on a bench.

At 6:00 we walk into the restaurant - to find out it doesn't open till 6:30. But they seat us anyway, close to the street. We ordered drinks and got the wifi password - we're good to go!

We started noticing that a crowd is forming - all of them men in formal wear. Then they came in, and we noticed the influx of a parade of Very Dresse Up People. We are NOT Very Dressed Up. We are in jeans and collared shirts. And sneakers. Soon other interesting people show up - ball gowns and tiaras for the ladies, tuxes for the men. Or not - some of the men are wearing white straw hats, or the classic beret with striped shirts and suspenders. A big crowd has now formed just inside the restaurant. This crowd is having a great time, whatever it is they are celebrating!

For dinner I had the chateaubriand - a phenominal steak. For dessert I had some "Supreme....something somthing..." - bottom layer was crushed pastachios, next a layer of chocolate <something>, a layer of vanilla <something>, topped by another layer of chocolate. Accompanied by the strawberry-est strawberrys ever. Scrumptious. Andy ordered <something> which turned out to be huge cream puffs with vanilla ice cream drowned in chocolate sauce (the waiter quite enjoyed pouring out the chocolate sauce with a "VOILA!"). YUMMMMMM....

A couple is seated at the table next to us - they have a little-bitty-terrier dog. Of course, I have to say hello to the dog. Turns out her name is Katyah.

We ended up having a delightful conversation with the couple - they are from Frankfurt, a 3 hour train ride away. Today is their 25th wedding anniversay, so they are having dinner and spending the night in Paris. We got to talking about dogs and birds and cats, and I don't know what. 

I stepped away for a few minutes for the obligatory trip down the stairs to the ladies' room. I had to thread my way through the party crowd to do it. Me in my jeans, them in their evening wear. When I came up the stairs, I was confused by tuxedoed men talking to me - finally, I understood them. They were saying,"Bon soir, Madam!" Oh my, well ok, "Bon Soir!".

I threaded my way back to the door to the outside patio where Andy and our table were. There was a (very tall and very nicely dressed) woman holding the door an blocking my way. She appeared to have no plans to move. So I said, "Excuse me?".

She looked me up and down, obviously taking in the t-shirt and jeans, stared at me, and said in the snarkiest voice imaginable she said, "Yes?"

I stared back and said,: I need to go back to my seat. Which is over there. On the other side of the room. Please let me by." 

And then I just walked under her arm and went back to my chair. Sometimes there are advantages to being short.

All of the other wait staff up to that point had been very nice to us - possibly it was just her job to keep the riff-raff out of the fete going on. But still, my goodness. Being polite never hurts.

All in all, the restuarant was fabulous. Kudos to my buddy, Jack, who recommended it!

Tomorrow: Not sure. Maybe the Catacombs.

9/8/14 Castles!

Today was the second of two Very Long Day Tours - Castles in the Loire Valley. Now that we've been in the city for over a week, we are veterans at finding addresses (sometimes despite what google maps tells us).

At 7:15 we boarded the bus - and thankfully, since this was a different company from last week, the bus was different. There was leg room and the seats were more upright. But there was no bathroom on board and a 3-hour non-stop drive to the first castle. A bit of a challenge there.

Today's tour guide was Lisa. We kinda noticed that her accent was more Italian than French - turns out one parent is Italian and the other is Argentine. She's fluent in Spanish, Italian, French, English and Russian. Quite a collection.

This tour was run pretty much like the last one - Lisa's main function was to tell us the logistics of each site, give us our tickets and tell us when to come back to the bus. OTOH, each castle provided good self-guiding information.

This is Chenonceau (SHEH-non-sew) castle from the 16th century:

Assorted Royal Ladies lived here starting in 1547. I like the turrets. The gardens were nice, too:

It took us about an hour to go through; the inevitable staircases predictably slowed us down a bit. 

In a vain attempt to minimize the amount of stairs I climbed today, Andy went down to the kitchens and took photos. The kitchens were huge:

We were a couple of minutes late back to the bus, but there was one couple who were a full 15 minutes late. Lisa was not happy that our schedule was now a bit off.

We had 90 minutes at the next castle, Chateau Cheverny (SHEH-ver-nee). This time included grabbing a sandwich (goat cheese, tomatoes and red onions on french bread) and eating it while watching the huge driving lawn mowers do their thing.

A relatively "small" chateau. This is the front facade, which the brochure says is a perfect example of Louis XIII design. The property has a kennel of hunting dogs and we could hear them on the way back to the bus.

The last and by far the most spectacular castle was Chateau Chambord (SHAHM-bor). It's so huge, I couldn't really fit it into one photo, nor did we have the time to walk far enough out to be able to do so:

Now THIS is a castle. There was a video abou the design and history of this castle - as French kings came and went, which parts of the castle were built out/up and/or enhanced. The symetrical design has a decidedly Leonardo da Vinci feel about it.

All the rooms are huge. Everything hinges around the center double-helix staircase:

This staircase goes all the way up to the top of the building. The most interesting rooms were on the 1st and 2nd floors. The 3rd floor was an art gallery (eh), and the 4th floor was mostly views from the terrace.

And here's the central staircase from the outside on the 4th floor terrace:

Mind you, this was about 200 steps up. And what goes up, must come down. In my case: very, very slowly. 200 spiral stone steps alllll the way down.

We arrived back at our starting point at about 7:00. We had dinner at a cafe right around the corner. We tried to find a pastry shop for dessert, but had no luck. Rather, I just ran out of steam after a few blocks of looking.

Tomorrow: the Rodin Museum. Depending on how long this takes, we may or may not walk a block over to Invalides, the former church-now army museum where Napoleon's tomb is located.

9/7/14 A Sorta Day Off

We didn't have anything planned specifically for toady. Andy did his long run (a part of his taining for the NY marathon in November). His run took a little longer than he expected, when he took a wrong turn somewhere. Took a while to get turned around and back where he wanted to go. He always gets great photos on his runs, but these photos are on his phone and not my iPad, making it virtually impossible to post to the blog.

While Andy was out taking the scenic route for his run, I took advantage of the opportunity to sleep late. It's helping me fight off this little annoying cold that's been nagging at me for a couple of days.

After he had returned and had recuperated a bit, we decided to go to the Jewish quarter for lunch. We walked up to Rue des Rosier - crowded with kosher felafel and schwarma cafes and jammed with people. A couple of the places had long lines. I got a kick out of this store front:

It's hard to see, but in the upper right hand corner it says (in French): "all meats and food products are strictly kosher". The line for that place was too long - we got a table at another place a few doors down.

Awesome schwarma and felafel plate - with roasted eggplant and red peppers, carmelized onions, pickled cabbage, plus the usual pita fillers. Best schwarma since our trip to Israel last November.

After lunch we wandered a bit. We checked out the Judaica shop, but there was nothing interesting - everything was stuff we could get at home (or had gotten in Israel), or was 100% in French.

Shopping has been a bit of an issue so far - there's tons and tons of shopping, if it's designer clothes and shoes you're looking for. We're not. We're more into artsy/crafty stuff by local artists. We hadn't found anything like that up until that point.

So we decided to walk in the direction of a street where Andy had seen a market during his early morning run. Unlike the Jewish quarter, where all the shops and restuarants were open to overflowing crowds, the area where we walked now was pretty much closed up. People were still on the streets, but the shops were closed, with random cafes open here and there.

Wandering and wandering, still hadn't found the mythical market. We stopped at a cafe to rest up (and of course take advantage of the bathroom). We ordered a little chocolate something for a snack. We weren't really sure what it was till it showed up - a mini chocolate lava cake in its aluminum tin. We didn't think twice about the tin - just gobbled it down with the whip cream on top.

As we were paying the check, the server came up to us and said, "We apologize for the presentation of the cake - we have a new chef, and he's just learning the routine. It should never have come out with that tin - he should have popped it out and put the cake on the plate. So sorry, apologize.." He went on for a bit.  Even after we assured him it was fine, he insisted that it was a poor job.

These people are real serious about their food.

We finally found the market - or at least where it had been. All the booths were long gone, though we could still smell the fish from the fish monger stalls. Good bet the market was done by early afternoon, and we were there after 5:00. So we kinda gave up for the day.

We made our way back to the hotel and collapsed for a bit. But soon it was 7:00 and if we were going to have dinner, it had to be soon. Tomorrow is an early day for our day trip to the Loire Valley to see some castles.

We asked for restuarant suggestions at the front desk, then headed to Le Precopio just a couple of blocks away. 

On our way we spotted a little store that had kids' t-shirts and other novelty items a step up from the usual tourist sourvenirs. This is what we had been looking for! I spotted an elephant teapot - it's bright red. Been here a week and this is my first elephant discovery. Pretty slow start. We bought a few other things as well, then made our way to the restaurant.

Andy had a veal steak in some kind of wine sauce, and I had a lamb stew (at least that's what it looked and tasted like). Both were great, but Andy's veal steak was better. For dessert, Andy had tiramisu (had a hint of coffee flavor, boo), but I had the "dessert of the day" - some kind of chocolate cake that was too-die-for....yummmmmm.

So kind of a slow day. But it ended on a successful note.

Tomorrow: Loire Valley and Castles! {and I'm assuming 9,233 steps....}

9/6/14 View(s) from the Heights

It was actually a bit of a toss up as to which photo to use for the thumbnail. This (obviously) the Eiffel Tower just before 10:00 p.m. when it does its hourly sparkly thing.

Today was our day to scale the heights of various Parisian structures. First, we went back to Notre Dame. Andy climbed to the top of the tower. Andy took a bunch of photos as best he could with the misty, overcast sky - but they are on his phone, not my iPad so I can't pop any  into this blog.

After he came down, we went into the church and toured the back half of the cathedral that we somehow managed to not see the last time. Here's the photo that competed with the tower:

Yey, there it is Big Window #1.

But since we don't have a museum pass at the moment, we didn't go into the Treasury. We'll be buying another museum pass next week to cover the Rodin museum and Giverny; we will have free time on Wednesday and Friday - if either day is clear and sunny, we'll try Notre Dame again. We'll keep trying till we get it right!

After Notre Dame, we took the Metro to L'Arc d'Triomphe. We went down into the underground tunnel to cross under the jagunda and insane traffice circle around the arch. Without thinking too much, we bought two tickets. When we surfaced at the arch, we realized we only needed tickets if we were going to the top. I personally hadn't planned on it, because I had assumed it was stairs only. 

Amazingly, there was an elevator! that took us to the floor with the chachke shop. There was still another flight of stairs up to the actual observation deck. That sure makes sense - make sure people can get to the gift store. Never mind about getting to the top.

Here's photo from the arch. The street on the right is the Champs Elysee:

Of course we had to have lunch on the Champs Elysee. As we started the hike to the meeting point for the Eiffel Tower tour, we absolutely had to do what everybody else was doing - stopping on the island in the middle of the Champs Elysee to get this photo:

The directions for the meeting spot for the tour was a bit confusing. It's good we left an hour for a 20 minute walk. We were supposed to meet on the steps of the Palaise Chaillot by the Tracadero metro stop. What "Steps of the Palaise Chaillot" means was open to interpretation. Fortunately, Andy thought to check another set of steps that might satisfy the description, and indeed that's where the meeting point was.

Here you go, the view from the summit of the tower:

This is a view of the Champe D'Mars. At the furthest end of the grassy area is L'Ecole Militaire - military school where Napoleon Bonaparte completed his two year program in one year as a teenager. Already an over-achiever.

We had hoped to have dinner at the Tower and stay till it was dark. Indeed the very upscale restaurant on the 1st floor had no problem seating us, even though we were dressed in jeans. The food was marvelous (for those prices, it had better be!). I had a filet of lamb and for dessert - well the name had many words in it and three of them were "chocolat".

After dinner we sat on a bench on the 1st floor and waited for dark.

This is a view of the Palais Chaillot at night from the 1st floor of the Tower.

We ended up staying after 10:00 in order to catch the tower do its sparkly thing. And we have come full circle to the photo at the top.

Tomorrow: Not sure. A free day. Maybe find a shopping street, may tour the opera house.

9/5/14 Way way way WAY too many steps

This (Sacre Coeure) was the last church we visited today, but it's the best photo. So of course it goes first.

Today was the last day of our 4-day museum pass. The goal was to use it for the audio guide and stairclimb in Notre Dame and the entrance to the Pantheon.

Except when we asked about the audio guide in Notre Dame, the recetionist said, "Oh they are not available." Not at all? All day? Or ever? "Oh I have no idea. There's a technical problem." Ah hah. Ok. 

We wandered around the church, took some photos. Apparently the organ is undergoing renovation; we heard the organ tuner working (one note at a time).

I've been using my iPad for most of my photos this trip. It works really well excepting when I need my hands to be super steady and avoid touching the screen with random fingers (like a thumb), which tends to cause all sorts of interesting an unwanted affects. Like when trying to take photos in dim light: 

This is the window over the organ. I thought that this was The Big Window, and couldn't figure out why the organ was blocking it. That would be because this ISN'T The Big Window. That was further down in the church. We just didn't walk far enough into the church.

Nevermind. We left the church and walked around to the line to climb the tower - an hour wait and counting. Ok, then. We're doing well here. Nevermind, again. The good news is: our hotel is no more than 5 minutes from Notre Dame, so we can try this again some time during the next week. The bad news is that the 4-day museum pass will expire after today.

We decided to proceed on to the Pantheon, about a 15 minute walk. Uphill. Uphill? Up until now, Paris has been flat as a board. What's this hill nonsense? Sure enough the Pantheon is on a hill. It's also under renovation (as is about 1/2 of Paris at the moment). It doesn't look like itself:

It's wrapped up in a giant roll of Saran Wrap. With photos of peoples' faces. The inside floor and ceiling right under the cupola have the same covering:

Some of the people made goofy faces. Pretty funny, considering this building is a mausoleum.

The Pantheon was originally a church, but after the French Revolution it was turned into a secular mausoleum for French people who made major contributions to French society, for example: Victor Hugo, Emile Zola (apparently his burial here was a controversial event). And these two underachievers:

Now it was lunch time. We stopped at the nearest cafe. I had cod over buttered (I think) noodles. Andy had duck ("canard") Awesome. We shared a chocolate crepe.

There was free wifi at the cafe, so we plotted the path to Sacre Coeure. Google directions were really weird and confusing - one option, if we took the nearest metro at the Cluny-Sorbonne stop, had us exiting the subway, walking a few blocks, then going back down. Um, what?

We decided to aim for the San Michel stop, which was about 10 minutes walk away. We went down into a station that was labeled "San Michel Line #4". We tried to ask at the ticket booth for the best way to get to Sacre Coeure. We had to ask twice, because it just didn't make any sense. Worse than Google maps.

But whatever, we went down the stairs (lots and lots of stairs today) and found ourselves on a platform for a train that was labeled: #10 line/Cluny-Sorbonne. Felt like we had walked into a Twilight Zone. Why had we bothered to walk 15 minutes to the San Michel stop to end up at the station that had been 5 minutes away? How the heck did this happen?

Worse yet, we took the #10 line one stop, climbed up a flight of stairs, walked across the station, climbed down a flight of stairs to be at: #4 line, San Michel. Isn't this where we were in the first place?

The ticket guy had us getting off at a stop named Chartre-Rouge in Montmatre. So we did. And we were suddenly in a different Paris than we'd experienced up until now - very dirty, trash everywhere, and homeless people in the street. I had heard that Montmatre was an iffy area, and yep, true enough it is.

So we started climbing. The Very Big Hill. Until we got to this:

Now we knew that there was a big stair climb to get to Sacre Coeure, but we didn't know what this was - were these stairs just the beginning? as in, another set of stairs to meet us when we're finished with this one?

I should have kept count, but I didn't actually start paying attention until we were more than halfway up, and I noticed that there were still 4 more sets (flights?) of stairs, each flight at least 20 steps. We must have climbed at least 100 steps already, with another 80+ to go.

At the top of this long staircase was this:

Turned out we had come up the back way. 

Ok here's the obligatory bathroom story: behind the white vehicle in the photo was the entrance to a (unisex) public bathroom. Of course I walk in (might as well take care of this now) - on the left are stalls and on the right are....yes, urinals. With actual male people using them. Yey. The good news is that there was waist-high screen blocking the, um, view, so to speak. Though those men looked as startled as the women, who darted towards the stalls. I got out of there as fast I as I could.

There were 50+ steps to go, and there we were at Sacre Ceoure. All very confusing - this is not at all what I remembered from 1977.

In theory there was no photography, though some people managed to sneak photos. Andy did get one really nice photo, but since I'm on an iPad and not my MacBook, there's limited ability to download photos. If I remember, I'll update this blog once I'm back on my MacBook.

A mass was underway when we entered - we got to hear the organ accompanying the nuns' choir. Quite beautiful.

Once back outside, we followed the signs to the climb to the dome. Which I opted not to do. Good thing, too - Andy reported that it was 285 stairs up and 326 down. Tight, spiral stairs with no hand rails. Yeah, my worst stair nightmare. He did get some phenomenal photos (he took my iPad with him). You can see the Eiffel Tower in the distance:

While Andy was busy climbing claustrophobic spiral stairs, I caught the tail end of the processional from the church. Had I been paying any attention at all, I would have seen the whole thing. The nuns and <I guess whoever wanted to join in> came outside the church, turned around and went back in, singing the whole time. I caught some of the singing on my iPhone, but I can't figure out how to embed it into this blog via the iPad app. Another thing for when I get home.

Once Andy came down from the tower, we took a fruit break before starting down the front staircase. The photo at the top of this blog was taken at about halfway down. I thought the front stairs were easier than the back stairs - not quite as steep; some of the steps were very broad and shallow.

The neighborhood in front of Sacre Coeure was more touristy than the one we had started in. If I hadn't been quite so tired, we might have explored the shops.

We were standing directly in front of a Metro stop called Avers-Coeure. Right at the bottom of the front stairs. We could not figure out why the ticket guy would send us to the other stop that still had a 10 minute walk through an iffy neighborhood before even reaching the stairs, when there was this stop just across the street from the church. Nevermind, nevermind.....

Yey, more stairs into the Metro station. This time we didn't bother asking the ticket agent for directions, we just figured it out from the big map on the wall. Geniuses!

When we arrived back at the San Michel station, I saw - and elevator! WOW. So we took it, instead of climbing I-don't-know-how-many flights of stairs. But. When we got off the elevator, there was still one more flight of stairs to go (of course) before exiting the station to the street. 

We had dinner at a restaurant 3 blocks from the hotel - Chez Fernand. I had the onion soup and the "legendary boeuf bourguignon" (that's what it was called on the menu) - it was, indeed legendary. Followed by the chocolate lava cake with salty caramel ice cream. yummmmm....

Tomorrow: Kind of a semi-unplanned day. We will attempt to re-do Notre Dame. Andy will climb stairs, I will see if I can do the audio guide and find the actual correct Big Window.

9/4/14 Successful Day: We Navigated Public Transportation Without Getting Lost

If anybody remembers our trip to Israel last November and the day it took us over 3 hours to get back to Modi'in from Tel Aviv (a 30 minute train ride)? 

Today was not like that. At all. We successfully navigated the Paris RER commuter line (got on the right train going out to Versaille, got on the right train coming back from Versaille - the first time!) with nary a hitch. Ok a tiny hitch - the rail map led us to a RER station that had not ticket machines. We stopped a guy coming out of the train station who was very helpful despite the language barrier. We had to buy tickets to Versailles at the Metro station across the street from where we were. 

Otherwise, everything went perfectly. A little hard to mess it up when Versailles is the last stop on the line, but the potential for ending up somewhere north of Paris by mistake was huge.

We arrived at about 9:30 a.m. The tourism office said it should take about 5 hours to do everything. And our museum pass (or maybe just an entry ticket) got us a free audio guide. The audio guide was a little flaky and took a little getting used to.

All the people who were missing from the 2nd and 0th floors at the Louvre showed up at Versaille. In theory this is no longer peak season. The Hall of Mirrors kinda looked like this:

The good news is that the crowd mostly flowed and moved along. Well at the zombie-shuffle agonizing museum-viewing pace.

The Royal Chapel is also pretty spectacular:

We were through the royal apartments in about 2 hours. The whole other chunk of the palace is under reconstruction, which was a little disappointing. So we went to lunch. "Angelina" is the name of the chain that seems to populate Paris museum food services. The server said it's a very old and well known tea house in France, known for its chocolates. Which we've noticed. Today's treat: chocolate eclair. Yummmmm.....

After lunch we finished up whatever we had left in the Chateau. Out in the courtyard was a seriously long line for the "Petit Train" - in theory, for 7.5 euros, it makes 4 stops: at the Grande Triannon, the Petite Triannon, the Grande Canal, then back at the Chateau. The maps of the estate didn't make it easy to figure out the actual distances between these things. We waited probably a half hour to get on this train to take us to the first stop (Grande Triannon), a 10 minutes train ride.

Here's the royal summer "I want to be alone" cottage:

We saw the line waiting for the train to the next stop. It was long. And when the train showed up, the line never shortened. I couldn't see how this train could keep up with the volume of people on the estate. We saw people on segways (I wish I had thought of that) and people with rented golf carts. I wanted to hitch a ride with one of them.

Turns out the next stop (Marie Antoinette's "get away" cottage was literallly a 10 minute walk away. What was the point of waiting 1/2 hour for a train to drive up the street? We walked it. Here's Marie's "get away" cottage:

It's now getting close to 3:30 - we'd been on the move about 6 hours. That seems to be my limit - I sat on a bench while Andy wandered around the grounds of the Petite Triannon and got nasty looks from a swan.

The line for the train magically still had not gotten any better. Checking the map, we just decided to walk to the Grand Canal:

Then we walked back up to the Chateau via the gardens. Have to admit, the gardens were a bit of a disappointment. Hardly any flowers at all. Only one fountain on at a time. This is the most exciting flower I saw:

And one last pretty view (it was this fountain's turn to be on):

Then we walked back to the train station, got on the correct train and arrived back in Paris 30 minutes later.

And no bathroom story! Well except for the fact that on the way out the bathroom was all the way down a huge hill going in the wrong direction away from the exit, which would have meant climbing all the way back UP the hill...never mind. 

We've finally noticed that cafes that call themselves "restaurant" have better (and more expensive) food than "brasseries". Brasserie food is fine; it's just that it's basically the same food we can get in the US. What's the point of that? So now we're on the hunt for "restaurants".

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a pastry/gelato shop. Gelato is always the right choice. I got three different kinds of chocolate squished into one cup: Dark chocolate, regular chocolate, and "amarino" (almaretto). YUUUUUMMMMMMM.....

Tomorrow is a relatively easy day. Tentatively: Notre Dame, Sacre Coeure and the Pantheon.

Ok, We're Done: We Saw The Mona Lisa and Now We Can Go Home 9/3/14

Gonna do that trick again:

So that La Giaconda will be the thumbnail of the post.

I mean, isn't she THE reason why people come to Paris? Of course not, but the madness around this painting is hilarious.

And I'm going to commit heresy, right up front: I liked the Musee D'Orsay WAY better than the Louvre. Way, way better.

Anyway, this morning before we headed to the Louvre, we went grocery shopping. Our first attempt had us at a market called "Picard" (yes, I said, "Jean Luc?"). On google maps, it had self-identified as a "super market". But the Picard market was very odd - all it had was frozen products. That's it. If it can be frozen, they had it. Not a single fresh item in sight.

So we went back to the hotel and just asked the front desk. They have been unbelievably helpful this entire time so far. The front desk guy showed us another market on them map. When we got there, this market looked like something we were more familiar with and we got back to the hotel with breakfast items and on our way by about 11:00 a.m.

We had heard from several sources that there is an "alternate" entrance to the Louvre that has no line. We couldn't find it. But we did have our 4-day Paris museum pass that allowed us to bypass the long line and walk right into the museum. Easy-peasy.

The glass pyramid that covers the main entrance acts as a lovely greenhouse - it was really warm in the lobby. And it also felt like the entire population of Paris was in that museum, which didn't make things any better.

We decided to bypass the Mona Lisa for a while. We went up to the section with 16th, 17th and 18th century painters from all over Europe. Saw some painters I'd never heard of, some very familiar names (Rembrandt and Reubens), and refreshed memories of at least one I had totally forgotten about until I saw his paintings of ginormous trees and teeny people (Russeau).

One thing about the Louvre: it has a LOT OF STUFF. Back on Sunday, the segway tour-guy had said that it would take 12 full days for someone to look at each item for 30 seconds. Well we have a solution for that - we didn't look at hardly anything for a full 30 seconds. We basically decided to make sure we looked at Important Things as identified by the museum map. Here's one, by Vermeer:

Same guy who painted "The Girl With The Pearl Earring". Which is not at the Louvre.

We were on the second floor of the museum - for the most part it was straight walking, broken up by random 5-steps-up-and-5-steps-down things, like at the M'O. We were almost completely by ourselves - we seemed to have lost all those people who had crowded the main lobboy. Which was just fine.

And I'm sure you all will be relieved to hear that there wasn't much of a bathroom story today. There were bathrooms all over the place. Except for the ones that were closed/"out of order" at inconvenient times. Or the bathroom that had one stall for men and onen stall for women (they were labeled). And when I came out of the women's stall, there was a woman waiting even though THE MEN'S STALL WAS EMPTY AND THERE WAS NO MAN IN THE ROOM.

But I digress.

After we finished locating Important Things on the 2nd floor, we went to lunch. I had a really nice chicken ceasar salad (fresh and tasty all white meat chicken and freshly grated parmigean cheese). For dessert we shared something that had 3 different kinds of chocolate. Awesome. My new Favorite Thing!

After lunch we tackled the 1st floor, where the Mona Lisa and a bunch of other Important Things resided. We realized we had found all the people who had been missing on the 2nd floor. Good thing it's technically "off season" - I had imagined the Louvre being wall-to-wall people, but it was only half as bad as that on the 1st floor.

We made our way around towards the Mona Lisa at a leisurely pace (seemed no reason to run into a madhouse) and checked off one other Important Thing:

 This is the "Winged Victory of Samothrace".

But of course you knew that.

There was a small mob around this statue. What was amazing was how people had no compunction at all about walking up and standing right in front of me, even though I was standing right there with my iPad up about to take the picture. Hah! that was just the beginning.

When we walked into the room with the Mona Lisa, this is what we saw:

Since I had expected the crowd to be overflowing into the hallway, this was nothing. Absolutely nothing - A PIECE OF CAKE. Helps to be a veteran of the NYC subway as well as the NYC marathon spectator crowd. Elbows UP! I'm going in!

In no time at all, I'm up by the rope, but I'm off to the right side. Gradually, as people took their photos and left, and I oozed my way over closer to the center. I kept snapping pictures in case for some reason I just couldn't get to dead center. The spot to my immediate left rotated amongst a family - daughter, mom, grandmother - but when Grandma gets up there, not only does she take her time taking her photo, she then has to take a selfie. I can't imagine what kind of shot she was able to get.

Once she finally left, I immediately oozed into her spot and got the shot that's at the beginning of this blog entry. After that, I'm done and I oozed my way back out of the crowd.

There were a bunch of Important Things in the immediate area, so we were able to knock a few off the list.

We were done with the 1st floor and headed down to the Ground Floor, where we left the maddening crowd behind once again; the rooms were pretty empty.

We had hoped to avoid "antiquities" (the last few years of vacations/cruises we've seen enough "antiquities" to last us a while - no urge to see yet one more exciting Greek or Roman pot). However, there were several Important Things in that area. My favorite was not the Venus de Milor or even the Michangelo. It was this little guy:

The photo makes him look a lot bigger than his actually is (maybe 18"?).

By this time it's getting pretty late in the afternoon, and I'm starting to run out of steam. To make matters worse, the Ground (0) floor and the -1 floor were absolutely crazy with staircases. To deal with the fact that these floors were right below street level, there were countless times that we had to go down a full flight of stairs, walk 10 feet, then climb right back up. This happened over and over and over again. Sometimes, if we were lucky, there would be an elevator at the bottom of the stairs, which helped eliminate the climb up. Actually there were oodles of elevators, but it takes some super-familiarity with the museum to really take advantage of them and minimize the stair climbing.

Between that and the slow zombie-shuffling museum-viewing gait - on the extremely hard stone floors - my legs and feet were done for the day by about 6:00. Even ibuprofen and constant little breaks sitting down (yes, another nice feature of this museum was ample sitting opportunities), didn't do the trick.

By 7:00 or so we gave up and headed to dinner, even though there was still a chunk of museum to go. But, we had seen all the Important Things on the Ground, 1st and 2nd floors (well ok we missed a couple on the 1st floor).

And we had seen the Mona Lisa, so now we're done with Paris, right?

So why do I like the M'O better than the Louvre:

(1) It's all about paintings from 1870 to 1910  (Impressionists), which is my favorite period and my favorite painters. The Louvre is a kitchen sink with all sorts of stuff flung in

(2) It's easily done in one day. The Louvre, not really.

(3) The M'O is better oranized and much less crazy stair case issue.

But we have the Musee Rodin next week - we'll see if Rodin can knock the M'O off its pedestal.

We walked back to the San Michele neighborhood that's right near our hotel (my feet were not going to go any further). Dinner was disappointing - the food was good, but not anything special or particularly French. But by the time we figured this out, it was too late to move again.

Tomorrow: Versaille. (assuming we figure out where the train to Versaille is).