Day 18: France: Sunny Day in Paris

Last time I was in Paris, it was very cold.

It was also before I spoke any French.

So I suppose this time was bound to be a little different. And I suppose that it was. We did a bit less, anyway.

We left Luxembourg on the TGV (The French bullet train) early in the morning, not long after 6 am. It takes two hours by bullet train to get to Paris, which is a shorter duration than any other method besides the plane. No issues with the train on the way there, I read my book and looked at the landscape.

After arriving in Paris, we wanted to immediately go to the Eiffel tower to try to beat the mass of tourists there. Our first difficulty was buying metro tickets. It seems the machines, at first, didn't want to sell us what we wanted, and then when we finally found one that did, it didn't take any credit card that we tried to give it. Fortunately, I was standing in line for the information desk as a backup measure, so we ended up getting our tickets that way. 15 minutes lost.

Now, getting to the Eiffel tower should be easy. It wasn't. Not sure why, but apparently most of the lines we wanted to take were closed in the stops between where we were and where we wanted to be. We played train hopping for nearly an hour before we finally got there. It was pretty frustrating. 

At the tower, the line really wasn't all that long (relatively) so we decided we wanted to go to the top of the tower. So we stood in line and waited. Took us awhile to finally get to the ticket place, and then afterwards, we stood in line and waited for the elevators up to the second floor. Mom and Dick managed to get on the one before us, so both groups had to wait. When we finally got up to the second floor, we got our nice views in, and then stood in line and waited to use the toilet up there. After all of that, we decided to go to the top, which required yet another line to wait in. When we finally did get to the top, there was a second floor that we had to climb onto to see out over the city at that height. Was it worth it? I suppose so. It was a fairly clear day and it was possible to see very far out over Paris itself.


To get down we had to wait in a series of lines to do the reverse of climbing up. All told, it took about 3.5 hours for just the tower. By the time we finally got off of the thing, it was time for lunch. We took the metro to the area of our next stop, and found a small little restaurant there. Everyone but me got the Croque Monsieur (or the female version, Croque Madame), which is a ham and cheese sandwich, essentially. The Madame version has a fried egg on top. I had a sort of salad, that had a bit too much oil on it but was good otherwise.

Our next stop was the Île de France, and a boat tour. We had taken this same boat tour when we visited last, so we knew just where to go. The boat trip lasted an hour and went along the Seine River, and the guide pointed out various landmarks such as the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and the Notre-Dame cathedral. The woman speaking was reciting a script, as she was pacing up and down the aisles and reciting every single bit in a sing-song voice. She even emphasized both the French and the English the same way, which generally doesn't turn out very well. We were able to understand her, however, so in the end it didn't really take much away from the tour.

After the boat ride we moved on to the Notre-Dame Cathedral. This, of course, is another of those postcard moments I mentioned in my London post. I wasn't super impressed with it last time I was there, and after the churches in Rome, it seemed rather plain. The bare carved stone did serve the purpose of making the impressive stained glass windows stand out better, however, so it was nice not to be overwhelmed with detail. About halfway through our time there, someone started playing the organ, but only holding out long tones in a slightly abnormal scale. We think that they were just testing it, but holding the high note out for about a full minute got old about the third time they did it.

We quickly moved on to see the Arc de Triomphe, another postcard place. We didn't spend long there because it was getting time to go back to the train station. We ate supper at the train station, which was fine with me.

Our train trip back was pretty uneventful, and we arrived back in Luxembourg about 10, so it was pretty much bedtime as soon as we got home.