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Published: September 16th 2010
Today is the last day of our tour. This morning we went on our city tour which showed us all of the sights of the city. First stop was L'Arc de Triomphe. What an experience just driving through the traffic! Our tour guide told us "There's no rules and it seems to work"! Everyone just enters the huge roundabout surrounding the Arc and it's a complete free for all. Our bus had to make it across the unmarked seven lanes or so to turn right! Phew! We applauded him when he made it across with only one near miss!
We stopped at the Eiffel Tower and went up the second stage first then paid a little more to go up to the top. Luckily as we were in a group we didn't have to line up. The view is amazing. when we came down we all regrouped then boarded the bus. We were just leaving when someone noticed that George wasn't on the bus! Our guide Marc went to look for him but after about 25 minutes we had to leave without him, having decided that he may have gone back to the hotel. As it turned out later he had
thought we were meeting at 2.30 instead of 12.30! Apparently a lady bought him back to the hotel.
Meanwhile we were visiting the Palace of Versailles. I think it's much better to have a real local guide with you when seeing places like this. Marc knew so many little details and told us in a more animated manner than the voice recordings you can listen to. He told us during the time of the royals families living there up to 3000 people lived in the palace. It's so sumptuous. You can just imagine the ladies walking about with their enormous dresses. He said they weighed up to 20 kilos. Of course many of the inhabitants came to a sad end, in fact we passed the Concorde Square where over 1000 people were executed including many of the nobility.
In the evening we went to "Moulin Rouge". It's a large theatre seating about 800 people who are crammed in, it's rather like eating on an airplane. The food again was mediocre but the show was something else, especially for the men! The show featured topless women throughout lipsynching to songs and dancing. I waited in vain for the men to get
their gear off but to no avail. The costumes (what there was of them) were fabulous. I enjoyed the circus, vaudevillian acts the most, they showed much more skill. The ventriloquist and the balancing acts were really very polished and proffessional.
It was quite late when we got back so straight off to bed.
The next day we were on our own after the tour. We were really tired but managed to go on a scenic river tour of the Seine, then off to the Musee d'Orsay. I really enjoyed that, seeing so many of the famous impressionist paintings. Degas, Monet, Manet, Pissaro, Sisley so many. It wasn't crowded either.
After the museum we had a photo shoot so that Barry could fulfill a lifetime ambition of sitting in a cafe in Paris, wearing a beret, smoking a Gauloise and reading the Figaro. We had a good giggle while posing.
For dinner we popped along to a local restaurant and were nearly swamped by a heavy downfall of rain, luckily it eased off as we set off back to the hotel. Tomorrow we're off to Nantes to see the war grave of Barry's great uncle.
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