Five Days in Paris

My husband and I arrived with our teenage daughter in the Charles De Gaulle airport outside Paris around 8 in the morning on June 21, took the airport train from terminal 3 to terminal 2, and bought 3 tickets on the B Line to Gare du Nord. This is a crazy huge station with shops and people rushing everywhere and it took us almost an hour in our exhausted can't-remember-any-highschool-french state to figure out how to buy metro tickets into town. But we eventually got them and arrived at the Campo Fornio stop, where it was a short walk to our hotel.

We very much enjoyed our stay at Hotel Des Arts, set in a pretty, quiet neighborhood with a good breakfast and friendly hotel staff. Annie and Jean-Marc at the front desk were particularly helpful.

After brunch (great omelettes, an overwhelmingly emmenthal-y Croque Berrichon and the little glass of espresso you get if you order un café instead of café crème) at a cafe in Place D'Italie, and a much-needed nap (we were graciously allowed to check in to our room early, at 1pm), and a quick stop to buy a carnet of ten metro tickets at a nearby bureau de tabac, we got back on the metro at Place d'Italie and went four stops to Gare Montparnesse, where S was to take the train to Rennes and stay with a family in Ercé en Lamee for a month. The big board overhead at the station made it easy to see which track her train was leaving from, and we lugged her much-too-heavy suitcases onto the TGV (with a pre-assigned seat) and waved goodbye to her for the next 4 weeks.

A music group was setting up down the street from our hotel as we left for the station, and a great band was playing in the station when we arrived, and we thought what an amazing city Paris is to have bands playing everywhere like that. Then we were told that this day (21 juin) was the annual Fête de la Musique and there would be music all over Paris. Indeed there was. We took the metro to Pont Neuf, with its beautiful view of the late-afternoon Seine and where festivities had already begun, with hundreds of twenty-somethings gathering on the bridges and banks of the river to listen to music and play music and party, and we spent the rest of the evening walking along the Seine to the Place de la Concorde, stopping on the way to hear the Paris Prefecture of Police Orchestra play outside the Tuileries, and then back along the other side of the river, with drum bands and jazz bands and rock bands and singing groups along the way, and even a live broadcast on an outdoor screen of a Beethoven mass. I think we collapsed in a heap at our hotel around midnight that day, though the music went on into the wee hours.

After a leisurely petit dejeuner of cafe au lait with bread and jam, we headed back out in light rain (there's a reason all the most beautiful paintings show Paris in the rain) to the metro at Place D'Italie and took the pink line to the Musée du Louvre stop. Of course, there are too many things to see in one day at the Louvre, but we did our best, renting an audio headset (well worth the 5€ extra) and heading first for Les Peintures (bien sur), where we took in all the ascensions and annunciations, and of course, the Mona Lisa. Even more enjoyable (fewer camera-mad tourists) was the collection of Iznik ceramics in the Arts of Islam section. After a morning of museum-gazing we went out for an ill-timed lunch. As soon as we crossed the bridge, it began to sprinkle, and by the time we found and ducked into a tiny bar to order focaccio and bottled water, it had begun to pour. When it let up a bit, we headed back to the museum, stopping under overhangs when necessary to wait out the worst and finally buying an emergency umbrella from one of the vendors who suddenly appeared in the Louvre courtyard.

After a bit more time in the sculpture area, we went out for a walk as the rain had ended. After all, who can resist a stroll down the rue de Rivoli, with its windows full of shiny, sparkly objects of desire -- things that could put a serious dent in one's otherwise well-planned travel budget? The Soizick store was especially tantalizing...

Heading back to the hotel, we stopped at the Bricorama around the corner to buy an adapter for the laptop, then went back to check for email from S and take a shower (no one serves dinner before 7 anyway, so there's always downtime from around 5 to 7) and then went out to Cafe Verdi, an Italian restaurant down the street from the hotel in Place Des Alpes. Afterwards, we hopped on the green line to Bir Hakeim for a late night ride up the Eiffel Tower. It's a long wait in line, but worth it to go up to either the 1st (187’), 2nd (367’ or 719 steps!) or 3rd (900’) level by elevator for a fabulous view of the city. We arrived in time to see the sparkly lights turn on at 11, and saw them again as we were leaving at midnight.

Saturday was the most fun day. Even though we had gotten home really late from the Eiffel Tour AND it looked like rain when we woke up on Saturday, we got up early and headed out for a bike trip with Fat Tire Bike Tours to Versailles. The sun soon came out and it turned out to be a beautiful day in all ways. First we met up at the company office not far from the Eiffel Tour, then rode en masse to Javel metro stop, where we unscrewed and turned our handlebars sideways and got on the train to Versailles, 2 or 4 people to a train car in the center section which allows bikes (or doesn't mind them anyway).

First stop in Versailles (after Mike, our very fine tour guide, ran around and put all our handlebars right again): the food market, to stock up on picnic items, and what a picnic it was! After pedalling out past Marie Antoinette's cottage (on one side, and a meadow of sheep on the other, with the sun bright overhead and some chorale music following us from somewhere), we stopped beside the Grand Canal to enjoy an afternoon feast of cheese and wine and fruit. Oh, the cheese! Vallee d'Ossau brebis and Tomme Corse Ottavi, with delicious chewy bread and salade piemontese and cherries and a bottle of grenache and raspberries. The trip also included a tour of the Chateau, which was nice and full of gilt and brocade and paintings of all the Louis' (XIV, XV, XVI) and their relatives and scientists and musicians of the day, but still not quite as memorable as the dejeuner sur l'herbe that preceded it.

In the evening, we walked around Notre Dame and le Sorbonne and had a bite at the somewhat pricy Le Grenier Vegetarian Restaurant.This restaurant, right across the river from Notre Dame, had a big selection of dishes, at least two of which were delicious: le potage de quatre legumes and the falafel. Both are appetizers but we were still full from the big Versailles picnic! Nearest metro: St Michel Notre Dame.

The two things I remember most from our long-ago family vacation to Europe were the ruins of Bolton Abbey in England and the stained glass windows at Chartres Cathedral, so I talked P into visiting it again with me. The north window, a rose window with 5 pointed arch windows below it of St Anne and four prophets, is especially wonderful, and the long delicately thin statues on the North porch are also lovely. Most of the structure and windows of the present church date from the 13th century, but Chartres is much older, and was a center for scholarly, philosophical and humanist study from the 11th century -- the stained glass and statuary of the church were designed to appeal to "simple folk" in the unenlightened Middle Ages. [You can take the train to Chartres from Gare Montparnasse, about a 1-hr trip. There are 3 or 4 trains each day and your ticket (~25€ RT) is good for one trip on any of them any time during a several-week period.]

Moving straight from the sacred to the profane, we took the metro to Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe for a late afternoon walk down the Champs-Élysées, crossing the river at the beautiful Alexander III bridge (passing a gorgeous model being photographed in the late afternoon sun, and the Palais Bourbon, where another camera crew was setting up to photograph Sarkozy and Condi Rice, in town for bilateral talks), and ending up in the Latin Quarter, the place to be on a summer evening in Paris. Around 8:30 (the usual dinner time, as it stays light til after 10), we stopped for dinner at Cafe le Conti, on a very busy corner just off Blvd Saint-Germain. Not only is this a great place to sit and watch the beautiful people (especially the Italian tourists) go by, the food is wonderful. I tried the cassoulet, a dish of slow-cooked haricot beans, sausage and duck confit (delicious) and P had a great big salad, bits of an omelette (the waiter mistakenly heard jambon when he said champignons), a whole lot of bread, and a bottle of Bordeaux (his standard Paris fare).

Museums are closed on Mondays, so we decided it was a good day to see Montmartre, where all good tourists end up. Following the "90-Minute Walk in Montmartre" outlined in the very colorful and useful DK Eyewitness Paris guidebook we picked up at the airport, we followed the hilly streets of Montmartre (a little like a European San Francisco) past the former residences of Van Gogh, Georges Seurat (on rue Andre Antoine), Renoir, Dadaist Tristan Tzara, Picasso, and the composer Erik Satie.

We also walked past the pretty mosaic-tiled St-Jean l'Evangeliste church and the larger but not as lovely tourist-filled Sacre Coeur, and ended up in front of the famous Moulin Rouge nightclub.

We seemed to be drawn like magnets back to Blvd Saint-Germain in the evenings, and that's where ended up on this evening too. When a downpour began, we raced for a nearby Indian restaurant, the Maharajah, which turned out to be a very good one.

With rain pouring and our departure imminent, we decided not to go on a tour of the Rodin sculpture garden as planned, but did manage to squeak in a stop at the Vavin metro stop to see Rodin's statue of Balzac. This monumental statue sits on the edge of an ordinary intersection: where Blvd Montparnasse meets Blvd Raspail. Commissioned by Société des Gens de Lettres, it was described by Georges Rodenbach in 1899 as "less a statue than a sort of strange monolith, a thousand-year-old menhir, one of those rocks on which the quirks of prehistoric volcanic eruptions froze a human face by chance".

Return to main blog page