Paris, a few weeks after...

OK, so my life has been interesting enough. But that's no excuse for not keeping up! The main thing is I have a new fancy laptop and I will have a new fancy or not fancy roommate soon. But anyway, how was Paris? It was great. Let me tell you a little about it.

Therese knew that our late evening flight was going to be delayed, and unfortunately, she was right, so we didn't leave New York until nearly midnight on Thursday, and arrived at our hotel well into Friday afternoon. And true to form, I slept very little on the airplane, so I needed a nap if we were going to do anything on Friday.

While I slept, Therese got her nails done and talked to the concierge, and explored a little bit. So when I roused myself, she was all ready with a plan: a walk to a brasserie nearby where we would have dinner, followed by a walk through a small park and a bus and tram ride to Sacre Cour Cathedral and Montmartre.

Dinner was great. A "tresor" of seafood - 2 kinds of snails, 3 kinds of shrimp, half a crab, half a lobster, about 5 different kinds of oysters, and dipping sauces and bread, with some white wine to wash it all down. Wow.

Sacre Cour is amazing. First, it's up on this crazy hill, so steep you have to take a tram/elevator. Then it's this insanely huge white building looking kind of spooky at night with all the lights shining on it. We went inside and of course there was a mass going on - just about every church we went into had mass going on (hey wait, isn't France supposed to be a really secular country?).

Therese knew the neighborhood so we walked around a bit to a square filled with touristy restaurants with big terraces, and a handful of artists drawing people's portraits. On the way, we turned and off in the distance through the dark was the Eiffel Tower all ablaze - my first sighting!

So that was it for Friday - I was starting to get really sleepy again. But Saturday we were planning to do the Ile de la Cite - Sainte-Chapelle and Notre Dame and whatever else we stumbled on.

We rose Saturday morning feeling really hungry, went up to the Executive lounge (Therese is a Hilton Diamond level member, so she and by extension me get treated like kings and queens). But um, no room at the inn. However, they gave us coupons for the restaurant downstairs, and that turned out to be a better deal anyway, so we ate breakfast there the whole rest of our stay. Fresh fruit, juices, good bread, cold cuts, croissants in like 10 varieties, sausages, bacon, eggs (with milk, blech), baked beans, stewed tomatoes (you know, all that English breakfast stuff), salmon, mackeral, hard-boiled eggs, and on and on.

We took the Metro to the Tuileries, to discover that they were looking kinda sad - lots of dust and very little in the way of foliage. We walked from there alongside the Louvre down to the bank of the Seine and walked along the river until we got to the Pont Neuf. Pretty cool. Crossing the bridge, we arrived at a triangular plaza - I was thirsty, but the places facing this plaza would only let us sit down if we were going to buy lunch and it was too early for that for us. So we kept walking, around the side of the building in front of us (Palais de Justice?), and found a cafe where we could have a soda. Then we were ready to go into Saint-Chapelle.

Now, they are cleaning some of the windows. But still the upper chapel is breathtaking. Of course, it's kind of small and filled with people, sitting in the chairs rimming the room, and taking pictures. The attendant shushes people when it gets too loud, which I loved.

Below the upper chapel, the first room you see is, duh, the lower chapel, which is also a gift shop. What a setting for a gift shop! Some of the columns and other decorative elements need some sprucing up with paint, but even so this room is pretty spectacular too.

From there we crossed through the next huge plaza to the crypt for Notre Dame, which is really an archeological record of the oldest remnants of the island and Paris itself (since that is where the settlement began in pre-Roman times). Pretty interesting.

Then it was on to Notre Dame, and can I tell you, the clean up job they did has left the church looking gorgeous. Everything looks fresh, and even the details that are a little worn down still look nice and polished - so they look splendid, but also show their age - pretty cool.

The main thing that struck us inside the church was the decoration on the outside of the choir section. The right side was all Passion stuff, while the left side was scenes from Jesus life. Included in the latter was a curious depiction of Mary's cousin Elizabeth embracing Mary and putting her hand on Mary's belly as if to confirm that Mary is really pregnant. I've never seen anything like that. It was very intimate.

Once we finished with Notre Dame, we were feeling a little beat, and hungry. Therese managed to find a particular compact she was looking to buy for her daughter, and we crossed over the bridge onto the Left Bank. Lo and behold, there was an outdoor cafe we saw down a side street. So we stopped there - I had a charcuterie plate, and Therese had some kind of sandwich I think. Anyway, it was just the right amount of food.

We went back to our hotel room for what was supposed to be a brief nap, but which turned into a long nap. So we had to change our plans again a little bit - putting off the Pompidou Centre until the next day, and just going out for dinner.

But again, what a nice dinner. Leon de Bruxelles is the closest thing to fastfood in Paris (unless you go to McDonalds) - mussles and frites and Belgian beer. Yummy! Filling, tasty, and pretty cheap.

More in the next installment...