Day 7 - Paris or Bust!

Day 7, July 10, 2013:

Well it is off to Paris.  A very early start to get the train to St. Pancras where we transferred to the Eurostar to Paris and arrived a couple of hours later at Gare Du Nord station in as the name implies the 10^th Arrondissement of northern Paris.  Paris is a beautiful city but a bit confusing to navigate as well.  The city is a bit of a spider web centered around the Seine with ring roads joined with streets that go every which way through the arrondissement or neighborhoods.  It is old, it is confusing and the architecture is beautiful.  The idea of the arrondissement was for people to be able to work, shop and live all in their own area so the shops and businesses are at street level with flats above.  Most streets go up about four floors and the faces are right to the sidewalk.  Now, traffic – it’s furious!  The streets are jammed with cars and loads of motorcycles, between the sidewalk and the street are cycle paths and if you dare step into one by mistake beware of the consequences.  The major roads also have parallel side roads that are simply made for pulling off and parking.  So you have to be very cautious where you tread for fear of always being run over by something.  This is a city made for walking, it is beautiful and the sidewalks are generally generously wide.  As well while we were in Paris it was sunny and hot – perfect sun dress weather for Parisian women – a definite plus!  The only difficulty is to know which way you are going, we frequently started off in one direction only to realize we were totally turned around.  As well In order to get around the huge ‘Place’ in the centre of the radiating streets you have to cross 4, 5 or 6 radiating streets to get to the other side and I can tell you that you take your life in your hands every time you do so.  Connor quickly figured it out – look ahead, don’t flinch, surge forward and look like you know what you are doing, this is the Parisian way!

Well enough about the roads, we trundled down the Boulevard Magenta on the way to our hotel at the Place de la Republic and stopped into a local market where we bought bread, a couple of cheeses, some chicken and a box of strawberries and sat down to lunch – this is some of the best and most reasonably priced food we had in all of France.  Fortified we made our way to our hotel which is in a typical old apartment complex of Paris and we were in a huge room on the top floor with two great windows looking out of the roof over the Place below.  This turned out to be a great plus not only for the view but because they were having nightly rock concerts in the square below and we looked out of our room right onto the stage  and the thousands of revelers below – it was great!

But I am getting ahead of myself.  After getting ourselves sorted out, it was time to learn the Metro.  A great system, it goes all over Paris, it is colour coded and all you need to know is the ending station for the route you want.  Quiet, relatively clean and cheap, much better than any surface transport save walking.  Off to the Louvre which is what brought us to Paris in the first place.  What can I say about the Louvre?  It is massive, it is stunning and it is crowded!  Even though the building is massive, you simply cannot see it all in one go, there seem to be a million people all starting in the centre trying to get anywhere else.  But once inside – oh my god the treasures that are housed here are amazing.  From paintings to statues, Greek, Roman, Egyptian treasures, crowns, jewelery, treasured serving pieces all carved from precious stones – I cannot possible describe the number of treasures under one roof.  But perhaps most spectacular of all is the building itself – the home of kings, the opulence of which led to the French revolution, the formation of the republic and the beheading of King Louis.  Hundreds of rooms, massive halls all carved, gilded, painted and adorned.  Each room itself is an art treasure and some of the halls are as long as an airline hanger.   I must admit that after several hours we were really simply overwhelmed and just breezed through the halls – ‘oh another art treasure’ – ‘look a room full of sarcophagi’, ‘Ooooo that crown has a thousand diamonds!’, well you get the idea.  By 7:00 we were done, tired, overwhelmed and ready for supper – back on the metro to our hotel then dinner on the square which was delicious.  We ended the night listening to local rock bands along with thousands of Parisians in the square and drifted off to sleep as the third band of the night started playing.