Paris!!!!!!!

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Tuesday, June 8th:

I got up at 4:30 this morning to take a shower before the big day! My mom and aunt had taken one the night before, so they wouldn’t have to get up so early…but I needed that wake up shower! I, of course, went into the kitchen first and got my first espresso of the day started!  Falco was stilled sprawled out, sound asleep!

Kenya bounded right out of bed the minute I told her it was time to wake up! She was ready to go before we knew it! Sooo excited!!  Since it was so early in the morning, we just decided to bring along something to eat for breakfast on the train. My aunt wanted to bring a bunch of food for the day, but we said “no way”!!! We definitely wanted to eat our way through Paris! And we reminded her that it was our treat that day! So we left the house at 5:30 and drove straight to the train station in Luxembourg. We didn’t have long to wait before we could board our car! We sat in a ‘quad’, where two seats faced the front, and two seats faced the back. The weather was a little iffy, so I wore a black tank and my lime green Paris themed jacket and black capris. I wanted to look nice and not like a super casual American tourist!  The train left around 6:15 and it was smooth sailing all the way to Paris! I can’t believe how smooth the tracks were…we just glided along them very quietly! We played games and read, and approximately 2 ½ hours later we were in Paris!!!

We arrived at the station called “Gare de l’Est”, which is in the east part of the city. Paris has 20 neighborhoods called “arrondissements”. We started off in the Montmartre, which is in the 18th arrondissement. It is an artsy residential neighborhood situated at the top of a hill overlooking Paris. We climbed up the hill towards the Sacre Coeur Basilica which was absolutely breathtaking (literally!) We saw a little café right across the street from the massive step climb up to the basilica, so we decided to stop and have croissants and espresso. French made croissants…omgeee! So delicious…hot, buttery and flaky!!! I could have eaten two of them, but remembered we wanted to try different food during the day! After our tasty treat, we started up the steps…there was a funicular that takes people to the top, but we decided to climb. I was going to count the steps, but got totally sidetracked when the stench of urine overpowered me half way up the steps! There were a ton of street hawkers from Africa and India there trying to get tourists to buy their stuff. They use the bathroom right there in the open!!! Ugh!! I’m so glad that the smell wasn’t everywhere up there! Once we got to the very top, we soon forgot about all of that! The view was just amazing! You could see for miles!!! We got our first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower that was about three miles away! Wow!! We went inside of the basilica and it was sooo beautiful! There were people worshipping and having a church service, and there were also lots of tourists (but not too crowded). You couldn’t take pictures inside (out of reverence), but it was really nice to sit in there and imagine the history of the place! As a matter of fact, there was a sign that was posted that said that there has been someone worshipping and praying in there, continuously, 24/7 for the past 125 years!!! That is amazing! When we walked about half way down, we got to take some amazing pictures of the city, with the Eiffel Tower way in the distance! There was also a glowing golden dome that we could see off in the distance! Just amazing! Once we got down to the bottom of the hill, there was a carousel ride that Kenya got to ride on…she was the only one on it! What a treat!

After visiting the basilica, we started walking towards where we thought the Moulin Rouge was. The map was extremely confusing, so I did what every other tourist does…ask for directions! The only thing was, is that I asked a French lady if she spoke French in French!! (I was trying to use a little that I had picked up here and there over the years)…what a dork I was! She said “oui”, and looked at me expectantly like I was going to ask her something in French! LOL So I asked her where the Moulin Rouge was, in English, and she pointed the way we were going. So we went a few more blocks, and came across the box office! We looked everywhere for the iconic windmill and Moulin Rouge sign, but couldn’t find it! We gave up and decided instead to try and find the Arc de Triomph. We walked about two blocks and ta-da! There was the Moulin Rouge we were looking for! 

After taking pictures in front of the Moulin Rouge, we walked about two miles and found a French bakery selling baguette sandwiches, so we all got one, ate half, and saved the rest for later. Delicious! Finally, we decided to take the metro (underground subway) to the Arc de Triomph…we had walked for miles! So we bought ourselves a book of passes (because we knew we’d be using the Metro again!), and hopped the next one towards our destination. When we arrived, about three stops later, we headed up the stairs from under the ground. Once we got to the surface street, all of a sudden we realized something was happening all around us!!! There were people streaming towards us with their hands over their mouths, and tears running from their eyes and there were loud explosion sounds coming from the Arc de Triomph! I pushed Kenya back towards my mom and aunt and made my way forward to see what was happening! My immediate thought was terrorist attack…I saw a group of about 1,000 people in blue scrubs, and smoke pouring through the air and the French Gendararmerie (police) lined up with their masks and shields up! What on earth??!! I took a bunch of pictures before we finally understood what was happening! The six lane traffic circle under the Arc de Triomph was completely devoid of cars and was instead the site of a hospital union worker protest!! And thus began our true adventures in Paris!

I was completely mad that there were no cars under the Arc!!! That is what I wanted to see the most besides the Eiffel Tower…the six lanes of constantly moving cars around the traffic circle! That is an amazing feat that I wanted to view first hand from atop of the Arc! But everything was closed and blocked off, so we watched the demonstration for a while…they were so noisy and boisterous! Well no wonder…some of them had set up a picnic and were eating cheese and drinking wine…directly from the bottle!! So we moved away from them and started walking to the Eiffel Tower, which was still about a mile or so away! No sooner than we got away, the group started to follow! They were taking their protest on the road! They blocked streets, got in drivers faces, urinated publicly (yes, we saw it happen), and followed us all the way to the Eiffel Tower! Now the sounds of the yelling and horns and noisemakers was starting to make us a little crazy, not to mention the crazy siren sounds their emergency vehicles make, so we decided to take a river cruise around the city in the Seine River! I had found out about it when researching for our trip, and it got great reviews! We boarded an open roof boat that had seats both on the outside and the inside. We asked the hostess where the best seats were for taking photos and she directed us to the left side of the boat. There were a couple groups of school kids on the boat but for the most part, it was a peaceful, beautiful ride! It was the best 50 Euros spent!!! We got to see famous sites, like the Notre Dame cathedral, the Louvre, Orsay Museum, Palais de Chaillot, and many more. I cannot tell you how many bridges we went under, but every single one was more beautiful and ornate as the last one! There were beautiful ornate wrought iron decorations, awesome and fierce looking gargoyles, and one even looked like it was decorated with solid gold fixtures! The day had turned nice, so there were a lot of locals out walking the path next to the river, some sitting and reading on the park benches, and some picnicking on blankets…it really felt like the Paris we think of when we watch movies and read books set there! There were also a bunch of houseboats docked along the banks of the river…most of them were very festively colored and decorated too. The cruise took an hour and a half, and like I said before, it was the best thing we could have spent money on, especially for being in Paris for just 11 hours!

Once we exited the cruise, we were relieved that there were no blue scrub-clad protesters (who Kenya eventually started calling them “smurfs!”) LOL So we went across the street and checked out the Eiffel Tower. It definitely looked different from pictures I had seen before. I thought that there was a huge space of land around the base of the tower, and there really isn’t…at least on the side we were on! It truly is a beautiful and ornate design…and it wasn’t black, like I thought, it was more of a rich brown color. What kind of surprised us was the kind of security we saw there…there were some pretty hard core looking soldiers there, carrying AK47’s and the like! There was even one soldier who looked like he was about 18 years old! There was a group of street performers who looked like they were of Middle Eastern decent, and the police came over and told them that they had to disperse…and they had a pretty good hip hop dance show going on!  We did not go up to the top of the Eiffel due to our time constraints, but we didn’t feel too bad about it…the river cruise had satisfied our needs to see the most sights we could. We walked down the street to a museum and saw the most unusual thing! The whole side wall of the 5 story building was a garden! It was so cool…the base was mossy and out of the moss all sorts of plants and flowers grew…vertically! I’ve never seen anything like it…not even an ivy covered building comes close! 

We stopped at the museum café and ordered an espresso (with whipped cream of course!!!) and we had the most amazing and beautiful view of the Eiffel Tower…I took some pretty cool shots with my camera on various settings!!

The next thing we went to go do, was shop and people watch on the Champs Elysee, the most famous shopping mecca in Paris! We went into the Swarovski store, where they had a glass two story staircase where each step was filled entirely with diamond shaped crystals!! It was very shiny and definitely appealed to my love of BLING!!  Lots of people were having their pictures taken on it. We also went into one of my favorite stores, the Louis Vuitton flagship store…where there was not one item under $500…or Euros really… I just LOVE their luggage and hope that ONE day, I could buy a piece!  We stopped at one of the many outdoor cafes, and had a late afternoon lunch. I had a salad and a quiche, and Kenya had a humongous frankfurter hotdog that was almost a foot long! It had melted cheese on top and it was very rich! She also had…wait for it…French Fries!!! LOL She definitely did not eat the whole thing!  My quiche was delicious too! Our waiter was a super funny guy who bustled around the tables like nobody’s business! We got a great view of the people walking along the sidewalk, so we kept our eyes glued to see if we could see any famous people…since this is where they shop a lot! Unfortunately, we didn’t recognize anyone, so we left to go walk along the Left Bank.

The Seine River is a bustling place to be, but it was really nice and quiet to walk along its Left Bank. We walked and admired the bridges up close and the darling houseboats too…in Paris, they are true boats, and not just floating houses, like those on Lake Union, at home. After we had walked a couple of miles, we noticed a flurry of police activity and some loud sounds coming from across the river…yup, you guessed it right…the smurfs were back at it again!! They had caught up to us again! There was no escaping!! We were going to go over towards their side of the river to get a closer look at the gold domed building that we saw when we first arrived that morning. But there was no way to pass all of those people and all of the emergency vehicles too! But we did find out what the gold dome place was…Les Invalides, officially known as L'Hôtel national des Invalides (The National Residence of the Invalids). It is a complex of buildings, containing museums and monuments, all relating to the military history of France, as well as a hospital and a retirement home for war veterans, which was the building's original purpose. The buildings house the Musée de l'Armée, the military museum of the Army of France, the Musée des Plans-Reliefs, and the Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine, as well as the burial site for some of France's war heroes, most notably Napoleon Bonaparte. The bridge preceding it was the one that I mentioned on the cruise…the one all decked out in what looked like solid gold! So beautiful!!! It’s too bad that those protesters had to cause such a huge commotion!!! Throughout the whole day we were hearing those sirens! But, I guess that if they would not have protested that day, we would not have had such great stories to tell! 

We headed back towards the Metro to make our way back to the train station, but were temporarily waylaid by a crepe truck! I can’t believe I actually nearly forgot to have a crepe! Kenya got a sugar one, and my mom and I split a Grand Marnier one…oh wow…it was to die for!!! The girl drizzled an entire miniature (think airplane size) bottle and a half onto the top of the crepe…then added whipped crème! It was sooo good! I’m glad I only had a half of the crepe because I felt a little tipsy after eating it! LOL

So we got on the Metro (subway) and headed back towards Montmartre…I had seen a bunch of gift shops when we were walking up the hill towards the Sacre Coeur and I needed to get some souvenirs. My mom and aunt were getting really nervous about the time, but I assured them I knew exactly where I wanted to go and what I wanted to buy. When we got to our stop, we must have missed the elevator, because all of a sudden we were at the stairs…little did we know, but it was a spiral staircase that went up and up and up…5 flights in, my mom and aunt were huffing and puffing and so I just had to get a picture of that!!! LOL …and my aunt is super fit!!! I huffed and puffed the rest of the flights up (three more), and we finally made it to the street!!! We had absolutely no idea we were that far down underground!!!

I scurried to my shops (yes, plural…) and bought my goodies!! When we ran back to the Metro for our final destination, I saw a street hawker selling faux LeSportsac purses and backpacks, so I stopped and bought Kenya a pirate girl themed one and she absolutely LOVED it!!!! I dropped all my change so my mom and aunt were helping me scrabble to pick them up all the time worrying about getting to the train station in time!! 

Well, I am happy to say we made perfect time (phew!) and when it came to finding our car, we had to walk two entire train lengths to find it…needless to say, with walking for nine out of the eleven hours we were in Paris, we were tired! We sat in the same configuration again, and this time a large black man from Africa sat across from us (do you remember what Idi Amin looked like? Look him up if you don’t…he looked just like him!!!) and for a while he spoke to someone in his native language on his cell phone...we were too nervous to laugh, but he sounded kind of funny, so we snickered under our hands and ‘looked out the window a lot’…LOL it sounded like he was saying “hubba bubba” a lot…and he was getting a little worked up too!!! 

We arrived at the Luxembourg train station at 11:30 p.m. and promptly went home and went to sleep!! What an amazing and exhausting day! The most memorable moments being the smurfs that invaded Paris!!! Also the sirens…we’ll never forget those!!!

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