Breaking the Dinner Time Boredom

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Today we'll be catching the train to Paris.

They seem to have some interesting contraptions here in Lyon. On the way to the station we pass a long ladder with a motor driven platform attached to it leaning against the window of a fourth floor apartment. We suspect that most of these buildings probably don't have lifts, and the stairs are probably very narrow, so it seems that you need a contraption such as this to get your furniture in and out. I'm not sure quite how you'd go if you had a piano. Issy says that if you had a piano you'd probably live somewhere else. There's another contraption in the middle of the station consisting of a table surrounded by exercise bikes which patrons peddle to charge their phones and iPads.

Our locomotive charges through the countryside at breakneck speed, and we cover the more than 400 kilometres to Paris in less than two hours. The landscape is attractive rolling hills, and a far cry from a lot of the dead flat farmland of our homeland. Train food's certainly not cheap. We get two toasted sandwiches and two cans of lemonade for the equivalent of nearly $30. At that price we're hopeful the sangers might be filled with lobster and caviar, but no, they're ham and cheese.

Our Paris hotel check-in desk is some tables pushed together in the middle of the lobby, and we join the long queue in front of it. We give the receptionist our documentation showing that we have a guaranteed booking. She looks perplexed. She says she'll see if they have a room available, and asks us to wait off to one side. We're starting to feel a bit uneasy. We wait for nearly an hour. There seem to be a lot of very unhappy people in the lobby. The reception staff all look very worried and seem to be spending a lot of time deep in conversation with each other. We think they've probably overbooked and don't know what to do about it. Sleeping on the footpath doesn't feel like a particularly attractive proposition. Eventually we're given the key to a room and we breathe again. We're very close to the Eiffel Tower and we get a great view of it from our small balcony.

We decide to get some laundry done. I admit to Issy under intense interrogation that I've been wearing the same pair of shorts every day for the past two weeks. She gives me an angry and disbelieving look. The hotel's laundry list suggests that it will cost us $5 to get a handkerchief washed, $8 for a pair of undies and $10 for a tee shirt. I'm pretty sure that none of my undies would have cost more than $8 to buy. I do some washing in the bathroom sink. I ignore Issy's directive to throw my unwashed shorts away, but I think I might be in trouble later.

We get on a hop on hop off bus to get our bearings. It all feels a bit surreal to be coasting past the iconic landmarks that we've heard so much about - the Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde, the Opera House, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Champs Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe.

We wander along the restaurant-lined street next to the hotel. The footpath's blocked by a disorderly queue of hundreds of Asian tourists waiting to get into a Chinese restaurant. They must be absolutely hanging out for their fill of noodles and fried rice; most of the other restaurants are half empty. I think there might be great business opportunity for someone to open a few more oriental eateries here.

The restaurant we chose doesn't have any room on the street, so we're shown to a table in the far back corner. I order a tequila flavoured French beer called Desperados, which is excellent. Unfortunately the food is not excellent, and that's being kind. The service is also terrible. We order water three times, but it never arrives. The waitress asks us if we want bread and then brings us a few pieces of toast. My fried calamari is a lot more fried than calamari, and looks and tastes like it's come straight from the frozen food aisle at the local supermarket.

The service is painfully slow, and we get bored waiting for our food. Really bored. We're also really tired; too tired for intellectual conversation, or any sensible sort of conversation at all for that matter. Last time we felt like this was in Florence where we ended up flicking bread crumbs across the table at each other. We can't do this tonight because the waitress didn't bring us any bread. Instead we line all the glassware up across the table in order from smallest to largest, with the salt shaker on one side and the Desperados bottle on the other side, and then make sure that the gap between each of the items is exactly the same. When we get tired of this we move the table cloth around very slowly until it overhangs by exactly the same amount on each side. We're not quite sure why we're doing this, but it does an effective job of passing the time. Our very ordinary meal costs us a staggering $140. We paid less than this for gourmet feasts in Lyon.

The Eiffel Tower's all lit up as we stroll back to the hotel in the dark. It looks spectacular.

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