lindsaydotcom | The finale of Lindsay's Paris recap.

I know I kept saying this would be posted, oh, weeks ago. But then life happened and my grand plans became a little less grand. Here it is, though, the rest of my Paris recap.

A tease:

Paris, Day 3, Monday

We started off mid-morning and got what was to be our standard breakfast while in Paris – a hot panini, grilled fresh to order at a creperie. Not your traditional French morning food to be sure, but it was reasonable in price (a foot long panini and a canned drink of juice or Oranjina or soda was 3 Euro at most places), filling, and the guys didn’t care much for the crepe experience, so it worked well for us.

First stop was the Arc de Triumph. The Metro stop exit is across the street from the Arc and we somehow missed the sign pointing to the underground passageway to the monument and proceeded to walk halfway around the circle until we found another passage. It took us easily five minutes of walking since the Arc is considerably bigger than I’d previously imagined.

This was taken on a small median in the middle of the Ave des Champs Elysees. A guy in that little grey car approaching from the left-hand side started shouting out “Photo!Photo!Photo!Photo!Photo!” while he drove past, which we found hilarious and repeated throughout the rest of the trip whenever anyone took a photo.

J, M, and Bryan

We spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon wandering the Champs Elysees, occasionally going into stores and even less occasionally buying anything. I did get the coolest toy tin spinning top that has two little accordion-shapes snakes that the top picks up while spinning and wriggles around. Hard to explain but tres cool. After the Champs Elysees we wandered through the Jardin des Halles and took time for M to ride on the merry go round before continuing on to the St. Eustache Cathedral which was beautiful but also undergoing external renovation, so no photos. Boo. Bryan and I decided not to go into the cathedral and opted instead to spend a while relaxing in the courtyard outside and watching the kids playing along the fountains and the statues.

We went to dinner at what seemed to be a fairly popular tourist area in the Latin Quarter, south of Blvd St. Germain near the La Cluny – Sorbonne metro stop (I think it all centered on rue St. Severin but I’m starting to forget things already). The lady who ran the place was so nice and came over to our table to talk to us about how we were enjoying our stay and what we’d seen so far, and didn’t even flinch when I no doubt butchered her language when I tried to order. We opted for a price fixed meal with a choice of appetizer, entrée, and dessert, and I got the onion soup, salmon, and fresh soft cheese with preserves for dessert and we all got sangria and sparkling water to go along with our meal. Bryan and M each got the steak and ordered it well done and were shocked at how pink it was in the center, and that was even after I’d reminded them about how rare the French like their beef.

Paris, Day 4, Tuesday

We slept late, we ate our paninis, and then we went to the Pantheon, whose dome we could see from our hotel room. This was another one of those REALLY BIG BUILDINGS that Paris likes so much, so I left all the photo-taking to Bryan and his wide-angle lens. There is a picture (and description) of it here though. The price of admission seemed a little steep to us so we didn’t go in it, but we wandered around the outside, which is where La Sorbonne University is still located.

From there we went to the Jardins du Luxembourg where I took a bunch of pictures and none of them came out (the hell?). We spent a good hour and a half there just sort of sitting by the pond with the sun in our eyes and then sitting on the opposite end of the gardens facing the palace. It was soooo relaxing. So we decided to go back to the hotel and take a nap since we were planning on going on a four-hour nighttime bicycle tour and wanted to be prepared for it. Our tour met at the Eiffel tower so we left a bit early for some photo stops there and at Les Invalides as well as time for a quick dinner (pizza) before it was time to meet up.

The bike tour met at one of the legs of the Eiffel Tower at night. At night the Tower sparkles for ten minutes at the top of every hour as thousands of light bulbs randomly go off. It’s awesome, in the truest sense of the word.

The bike tour was FABULOUS. It was probably my very favorite thing from all of my vacation. By the end of the three-hour biking part my butt hurt and my ears were ringing from the wind rushing past and my face was stinging from the cold and I loved it all. We went ALL OVER that darn city, including most of the places we’d already been to on our own but we got to see the lights shining and that was just beautiful. It was an American-run operation and run entirely in English so we would periodically stop and listen to the guide talk about the various monuments and points of interest. Our tour stopped at Berthillion’s on Ill St. Louis, and I absolutely believe that it’s the best ice cream I’ve ever had. After our cones were finished (devoured) we decided that we were going back the next day for more.

Unfortunately, the one bad part of the entire vacation also occurred that night on the tour. We were just crossing one of the bridges over the Seine in order to enter the Louvre complex and we saw that there was a group of guys congregated around one of the benches, and that they’d been drinking. One of the guys saw our group approaching and reached out to the girl a bit ahead of me and tried to spank her on the ass as she passed. I was fairly surprised. Did I really just see that happen? But before I could even process seeing it the guy turned to the next biker in line. Me. As I passed he reached out to grab my neck presumably to pull me off my bike, and I think in my shock I called out “no, don’t!” but I kept peddling and got past the rest of the group. Bryan, who was in back of me told me that the guy tried to push him off balance and make him fall off his bike as he passed. I was upset and jittery, but one of the gals (the one who had been spanked) was an exchange student there and explained that it was a matter of them being drunk, rather than a matter of them being French, but that it was apparent we were an American group and he thought we’d be easy targets. And, of course, we were. But it was over so fast that I tried not to let it spoil anything for me.

The tour ended with a one our cruise on the Seine, along with some wine, and then we went back to the hotel.

Paris, Day 5, Wednesday

For our last day we headed out to Les Invalides to tour the monument housing Napoleon’s Tomb and go through the Museum of the Army. The World War II exhibit was particularly good, and there was an interesting wing devoted to the French Resistance.

I honestly had no idea about the scale of the resistance… I’m surprised we didn’t cover it in school. Perhaps our cultural biases come out more than we realize. There was one particular poster there, written in English, which welcomed the U.S. and U.K. forces who had arrived there and proclaimed how thrilled they were to see us and how they’d been waiting for that day and hoping for it, no matter how it looked to the outside. I suppose it could have been some revisionist history going on, but the poster made me cry.

In the afternoon and at my insistence we went to Sacre Coeur. Granted, I somehow got everyone off at the wrong metro stop and we had quite the hike to get there, but it was spectacularly worth it.

There is an amazing view from the top of the steps since Sacre Coeur is on the Montmarte butte overlooking the rest of Paris.

After taking in the views we wandered a bit over to where the Moulin Rouge still operates.

Dude. It’s so tawdry. I’m glad we didn’t go to a show there. It’s in an area called Pigalle which is infamous for their sex shops and garish neon signs. I was highly amused to see that while on the whole most signs in Paris are in French, EVERY single sign advertising something sex related was in English. Gee, I wonder who their target audience is. We saw a transvestite with truly phenomenal legs.

We saved going up to the top of the Eiffel Tower at dusk until the last day. And it was as beautiful as we could have hoped for.

Back to the Latin Quarter for dinner: onion soup, beef bourguignon, and fresh cheese for dessert, and shopping until we went back to the hotel.

Paris, Day 6, Thursday

We got up and waited for our shuttle to the airport. Normally we would have just taken the RER to get there but we’d been warned by an American couple at the Eiffel Tower the night before that the U.S. State Department was recommending people not take the RER due to the rioting. Unfortunately, the hotel clerk who made the reservation for us the previous night made it for later in the morning than he should have and then to compound that the shuttle driver was late, so we were all very, very tense the next morning while we waited. Turns out we should have been more worried about the driving, since the drivers in Paris are MANIACS. We nearly got into an accident about a dozen times and one time a motorcycle actually scraped the van as he passed us. We made it to the airport with very little time to spare and then continued to worry while we waited in a very long line to check in our bags, but we made it onto the plane with no problems and had a smooth, short flight to London.

In Heathrow, M and I waited by the gate while the guys went to get one last pint of beer. Silly boys. When we joined the line to board the plane we managed to get right in back of an old French man who was trying to engage the gentleman right in front of us in a conversation while sticking his hand down the front of his sweat pants. His story consisted of a time when he tried to engage a prostitute who apparently rebuffed him by saying “no money, no honey, go spank the monkey,” and didn’t we think that was a funny story, ha, ha, ha, ha? Oh, god. I have never been so thankful that our row on the plane consisted entirely of our group. If I’d been next to that guy I’d have pitched a fit. We made it home after watching hoooours of movies (The Island, [the original] Ocean’s 11, Runaway Jury, and something else[?]) and then forced our way through a THRONG of people surrounding the carrousel with mounds of bags and a sea of baggage carts before making our way through customs and then driving home at what felt like 6 in the morning. We arrived home to 19 messages on the answering machine, 16 of which were recorded message pleas about the CA special election. Two days later we retrieved Scout from my mom, and our little house felt like home again.

And that’s that.