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Our apartment from the street
Cathleen is standing across the street from our apartment. Our windows are the 3rd set of French doors up, below the window boxes filled with vines. By 1:30 pm when we returned to our apartment, we'd logged over 12,000 steps according to Cathleen's pedometer! Our doggies are tired! We went out early this morning - by about 7 am we were heading north on the Metro to the area of Paris called Montmartre. Montmartre (Martyrs' Butte) is the highest point in Paris and at the top of the hill is a white Byzantine-style church called Sacre Coeur (Sacred Heart), consecrated in 1918. We followed one of the tours in our Walking Paris book and got to experience many of the narrow, steep streets and passages of Montmartre, getting glimpses of Sacre Coeur at different points as we wound our way around the butte that it sits upon. Our walk ended at the church and we entered the church and got to see the beautiful mosaics and the interior of the domes.
Last night we realized that our adapter to convert both voltage and plug-type for the electricity wouldn't integrate to the outlets in our apartment, so we needed to get an adapter for the adapter. Our host recommended a trip to Bazaar Hotel de Ville (BHV), a department store with multiple stories: Dillards meets Target meets
The 'Hood
Looking down towards the Institut de France. Our street is on the left, with the green awning. Home Depot is the best equivalent we can come up with. Having found our adapter there, we bought a great lunch (cheap!) of panini sandwiches, drinks and the cutest little tartes! Dan's been on a chocolate binge so he chose a dark chocolate / banana tartelette and Cathleen had a custard and raspberry tartelette -- YUM! We ate our sandwiches sitting along the wall of the quai of the Seine River - and lo and behold! We had a true Parisian experience - getting to watch a demonstration of students complete with a platoon of policemen with boots up to their knees, some heavily armed and some with riot helmets. Cathleen's best guess is that the students were protesting something about their school - their signs said their school was "sick" and they were all wearing white coats you'd expect to see on doctors. They marched by us peacefully and turned the corner and appeared to disband. Ah, France!
Having refueled we decided we were up to visiting some more monuments, so we walked across the bridge to see Sainte Chapelle (Holy Chapel), built about the same period as Notre Dame. This church is famous for its stained glass.
What they do with guns in France...
Our neighborhood is filled with all kinds of studios (ateliers) and galleries - but I'm not sure if we could get past airport security with a Kalishnikov lamp... There is so much stained glass, in fact, that the walls appear to be made of it - an impressive feat for the 13th century. This church was built to house holy relics like the Crown of Thorns - yep,
that crown... None of the relics were on display - they may in fact have been stolen or destroyed during the Revolution like many other important items. At some point in history as the legend goes, one of the French kings (probably a Louis) gave away individual thorns as political favors. Ah, France!
Next, we headed to the Conciergerie, a massive building on the river. In the Messes des Gens d'Armes (Guards' Mess Hall) we were very impressed with the vaulted ceilings and fireplaces 10 feet tall and probably the same width. This was where the guards dined, sometimes in the presence of the king. The building later became a prison whose most famous prisoner was Marie-Antoinette before she was guillotined in 1793. It remained a prison until 1914 when it was designated a historic monument. Leaving the
Chateau Rouge
Dan in the Metro where our Montmartre walk started - Chateau Rouge means Red Castle. We thought Maddie would like that. Conciergerie, we walked to Square du Vert-Galant, on the tip of Ile-de-la-Cite and savored our tartelettes. Ah, France!
It's only 4:45 pm here so we'll head out in a bit for some dinner and maybe a trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower. It stays light here late (we don't really know yet how late as we fell asleep about 8:30 - it was as late as we could manage with our jet lagged brains). So more on that tomorrow! We hope all is well for everyone and that the girls are enjoying their days and sleeping well at night!
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Sue Peters
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Looks like fun!
We laughed, are you vacationing or blogging??? Pictures are fantastic, hope you are having fun! Love Janie