The curse of Father Steven remains strong...

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Getting to St Just

We touched down in Charles de Gaulle with extremely heavy packs. Damn. But we were excited to be going to St Just again. As renting a car for five days was cheaper than two return TGV tickets to Redon and gave us a lot of freedom in between, we had rented a car over the internet. So it was with excitement that we went to the Hertz counter to pick up our Fiat Panda. After waiting for half an hour the man told us that as we had a reservation we could have just walked outside and picked up our car and gone. The only map that Hertz gave us was this little crappy map of central Paris but, to its credit, it got us half way out before we got lost.

But getting lost was nothing compared to the bigger issue: the key to our house, normally resident with our next door neighbours. We called them twice on the 6 hour drive across northern France to no answer. As we pulled into the drive at 1:30am we just gave up and slept in the car. Incredibly uncomfortable. I woke up at 7 and walked to the bakery to get two delicious pain au chocolat and a baguette (this is the first attempt to make you jealous through food). I walked back to our neighbours and rang the bell. Not there. They were on holiday. Bugger.

As I walked back to the house, ringing my mother to ask why she had refused us the key I saw that the back door was open. Wide open! We could have slept in a bed that night! AAAARRRGH! Never found out why it was open, the neighbours knew nothing.

Slothdom and gluttony

What followed was a glorious three days at home. We went to the shops to stock up one food. Breakfast, as always, pain au chocolat with coffee or chocolat chau. Lunch was fresh baked baguette with your choice of ham, salami, cheese, salad, etc. Then finish off the night with our favourite meals (spaghetti bolognaise, pepper steak and galletes with crepes) plus drinking beer and champagne all day.

We managed to go on a couple of walks but most of our days were taken up with reading in bed or a week long operation in using Western Union to pay for our Inca Trail deposit. My God! The woman would not tell me how many Euros we needed to make up US$700 so we guesstimated and it came out wrong. So we upped our ante and filled out all the forms only for this woman to accidentally process both transactions. She then had to call Western Union and started freaking out and blaming us in French. She closed her counter and was running around like crazy telling us to fill out forms, then throwing them away, then asking for them back again. We got out after about 45 minutes and she went home for the day. Oh well. We felt kind of guilty but really happy we finally got it out the way.

The highlight of our stay in St Just was Wednesday night, when we went out to drinks with neighbours Pascal and Katrine (the farmers who danced till four in the morning at the blessing and went to milk their cows almost straight away) followed by Helene coming home with us for a nice dinner.There were only two downsides to our trip to St Just (other than losing the key): 1. I got through all of a trilogy bar the last 40 pages and could not take them with us because they are too heavy, damn it! and 2. We bought way too much food. On our last night, preparing for a 6am start on the drive to Paris, we were up to midnight packing, drinking and making baguettes, packaging salad and French onion dip and spaghetti to take with us on the drive. We ended up with enough food to last us all day Friday and for breakfast Saturday.

The longest day

Father Steven, you were the belle of the ball at our wedding but damn you for your sermon stating that we were going to have complicated lives! May you live in interesting times! We left St Just at 7:15am after a last minute clean and made excellent time. We were approaching the outskirts of Paris at 12:30, on time to get to CDG to drop our car back for 1pm. The N12 on our crappy little map (which has soooooo much to answer for) turns into the A12, the road we wanted. Except that to go in a straight line, we had to turn off the road. We flew past this turn off and it was only about ten kilometres later that Ana realised we were heading to the opposite side of Paris on the A86. Desperate times.

We missed two possible options to return back onto the right path but there was too much traffic. It was fine, we just had to wait for the A6. The A6 did not allow us to turn left towards Paris, we could only take it to head to Bordeaux. This is probably because only stupid people find themselves on this stretch of the A86 wanting to head towards Paris. So we resigned ourselves to doing a massive loop of Paris. Unfortunately, every sign telling how long to the next turnoff said Bouchon. It did not take us long to realise that this meant traffic jam as we crawled for kilometres.

Finally we saw a turnoff to some back streets and got the hell out of dodge. To my terror it turned underneath the A86 and rejoined it going in the opposite direction! Thankfully it was only a momentary panic as we reached the turnoff for the N305 into Paris. So we changed from moving at 3km an hour to moving 35kmph but stopping at traffic lights every 50m and dodging pushy Parisienne drivers. We had gone along this road, searching for the ring road but steadily we got more and more terrified that we had gone past it and ended up in the middle of down town Paris on the wrong side!

Let it be said that when I get stressed I become a terrible driver and had Ana gripping tightly while I took on the wet roads. Did I mention it was raining? Of course it was raining. Thankfully I managed to see a likely looking road and found ourselves battling to get onto the ring road. Hallelujah. Except, the friendly 'bouchon' signs still awaited us. We went back to crawling, but at least there was calm again in the car. The driver-navigator relationship had strained our new marriage a little but we survived. Finally we got far enough around Paris to get onto the A1 to Charles de Gaulle.

Then, French road signs fucked with us and almost killed us. We were in the left hand lane of four, following signs to Charles de Gaulle. Suddenly, there was a sign over the far right hand lane to Charles de Gaulle with a traffic island approaching! I had to attempt to cross three lanes of traffic... and failed. We had to stop and get French people to let us in. It took about two minutes of creating our own bouchon to find a kind driver to let us in. We got into the lane. We followed the sign to CDG. Then, just to please Mr Murphy, that lane rejoined the original highway and the traffic island disappeared. I could not believe it! I just hung my head in shame and hoped that none of the people we held up recognised us. Only one more scare as we entered Charles de Gaulle, were in the right lane, and then the sign changed and gave us about 10m to change lane again. We almost died. Again. Damn French road signs! But we got rid of our mercifully unscratched Panda and shouldered our 20kg packs to head to our hotel near Gare du Nord.

We got there and I immediately got the feeling that knowing the name of our hotel and that it was 'right of the entrance to Gare du Nord' was not going to be enough. We got out and walked past about 50 hotels without seeing ours. Went back to the Gare to tourist information to find an internet cafe to read our booking details which I had neglected to write down before setting off. So we walked through the light rain to an internet cafe and found the address and realised that the directions had said 'right in front the entrance'. Chas chuckles nervously to try and cheer a tiring Ana. We set off again. Ana is fading fast. (Chas, why oh why did you just not write down the directions?!!) It begins to rain hard and neither of us want to take our extremely heavy packs off to get our jackets and so are getting soaked. We make it in front of the entrance but find no hotel. We ask for directions to the address and finally, after a long walk, find the hotel; not in front of the entrance to the gare but back past the internet cafe we had been in ten wet minutes earlier. I was not the most popular person in the marriage at that point. After a much needed sleep, it was raining so hard that all we could muster the energy to do was hit a cafe to watch England beat Tonga to qualify for the quarter finals of the rugby world cup.

Autumn comes through on its promise

Coming to Paris just to be rained on was not part of the plan. We crawled out of bed the next day and caught a train to Notre Dame. Our previous trips to Paris had only blessed us with the outside of the cathedral. On this day, despite the lack of light outside, it was stunning. It was sumptuously lit, using shadows to highlight statues, artwork and the incredibly high and beautiful vaulted ceiling. Despite the hundreds of tourists taking photos, it still felt incredibly spiritual and Ana and I felt compelled to light a candle and say a prayer for Helen, a cousin of Ana's father, who died last week. It was memorable.

We wanted to return to Sainte Chapelle which we had visited five years before on an order from Peter McKee; it is a much underrated stunning church where the walls are almost entirely stained-glass depicting much of the Bible. But, we had seen it in summer glory and the autumn gloom that so suited Notre Dame was unlikely to repeat itself in Sainte Chapelle.

However as we cruised leisurely along the river, the sunshine came out. It reinvigorated us and once more felt like Paris, a city of sumptuous beauty perfect for walking around, not taking shelter in metros between tourist sights. We walked along the Seine till we got to the Louvre, crossed, and walked the length of the Champs Elysees. Took in an accident at the Arc de Triomphe (did not wait morbidly for one to happen like Ana wanted, it just did). Headed towards the Eiffel Tower and found this really beautiful market on New York Ave. It felt so local, the hoards of tourists in town for the World Cup (jacking up all the prices and annoying me by speaking in English in loud voices) had yet to find it. As Ana needed to pee, we escaped and found ourselves outside the Tokyo Palace, a modern art gallery. We passed through and thought Paris has too many beautiful things to see... other than the Eiffel Tower. Up close it is pretty uninspiring and the four lines were hundreds of people long. So we passed on, eager to see something that we had not seen on our last trip to Paris five years before.

We went to the catacombs. Paris´cemeteries filled up a few hundred years ago and os they tossed all the bones into abandoned quarries 20m beneath the towns. Some morbid genius decided to arrange all the bones in this particular ossuary into some beautifully Gothic and faintly creepy order. All the skulls were lined up on mounds of femurs with everything else just chucked in behind. The deep spiral staircase and long (2km) underground walk in cramped tunnels adds to the atmosphere. I do not think it is amazing, but there was something very odd and attractive about the whole experience. I also love that many of the remains are of famous people (even executed aristocracy from the Revolution).

We headed back to our hotel to sleep because that night we were due at the Moulin Rouge. This show was spectacularly (am not stealing the adjective from Baz Luhrman) professional; a dancing extravaganza that was only different from most musicals because most of the dancers had their breasts out. There were many many breasts. And a few amazing set pieces. However, most the singing looked mimed and there is only so long that staring at bouncing breasts exciting (or am I not man enough? Rhetorical question, do not answer).

The next day the weather was even better! It felt more like summer than July in France had. After dumping our bags at the station we were leaving from that evening we went on another walk. Took in the Musee d'Orsay which sadly was not as inspiring as last time. This is not because I am any less enamoured by the Impressionists, I am, but Ana and I were both coming down with something. Another slog up to Montmartre to see a Dali exhibit recommended to us by Zac was similar; it was great to see how widespread and beautiful his work was outside the very finished famous pieces, but we were just too tired. I definitely recommend it though, his fashion and interior designs are pretty out there.

And so we wound up in a bar watching Argentina - Ireland, the very reason we were in Paris. We had not got tickets sadly but it was enough to support them in the face of the Irish nation (all of whom were in Paris) and the French who were braying for Argentina's blood. If you did not know, Argentina's fabulous victory means that the Pumas have topped the group and meet Scotland instead of New Zealand in the quarter finals!!! YAY!

We ended our weekend in Paris with nutella crepes, as both God and Sof intended.

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Photos

Paris detour
Green line marks intentions. Red line actuality. Not enough time to put in rain storms, traffic jams and life threatening incidents bar the main one. Red dots marks road we could not turn onto.

An accident at the Arc de Triomphe
Unfortunately for the person behind, the person who got out of the big black car was indeed a big black policeman.

Chas wins at Pass the Pigs!
If you do not know this game where you have two pig shaped dice and have to roll them into certain high point positions, you have not lived!

Chas in our tiny tiny bathtub in our hotel
Avert your eyes you perverts!

Comments

[Zac and Sof]

No assing around this time
In your last blog you referred to Andy Warhol's 'ass produced' art. Just as well he didn't eat all the crepes that you've been eating, or he would have needed pretty big canvases. Chas, that's cleavage in your naked photo. Dude. Seriously.