Paris

While I was in Slovakia working, David continued hosting our guests. London was Cristy’s last stop on her European tour, so she headed back to the states on Monday. The Vollmars took a side-trip to Switzerland on Tuesday, and then the Sylestines left for Paris on Wednesday. I flew back into London late Thursday night, dumped out my suitcase full of work clothes, and repacked with weekend clothes. On Friday after work, David and I hopped on the Eurostar and crossed the Chunnel to Paris to meet up with Molly and Jeremy for the long holiday weekend.

The Sylestines found us a great apartment in the Bourse area of the city through HomeAway. They’ve had really good experiences with HomeAway in the past, but we’d never tried it before. It turned out great! The apartment was huge and really cost effective, which gave us a lot of space for not a lot of money. Plus the owner was nice enough to let us “check out” late on Monday since our train back to London wasn’t until 8PM.

On Saturday morning, we woke up early and took the RER, the Paris rail network, to Versailles. David used to visit Paris all the time when he was younger and lived in London, but surprisingly he had never been to Versailles. And it was Jeremy’s first time in Paris altogether. So since both boys hadn’t been before, we decided to visit.

The weather was gorgeous all weekend, which made our trip to Versailles even better. Everyone else in Paris must’ve had the same idea on Saturday morning, so the line outside the palace was crazy long! It snaked around the entire inner courtyard… and here is where we encountered our first Paris line-cutter. After we had been standing in line for about 45 minutes, some random guy just walked up and stood next to David. At first we thought he was looking for someone, or just pausing. But, no. He was actually trying to stand in line. So David nudged the guy and said, “Hey! What are you doing?” The guy started talking back to David in a foreign language. Instead of attempting to communicate verbally, David physically nudged the guy out of line. Basically, elbowed him away. Who has the nerve to cut like that anyway? We were having none of it!

Once inside Versailles, we toured the palace, which included the king’s chamber, the chapel, and Marie Antoinette’s bedroom with the hidden doorway that helped her escape when the Parisian mob forced its way inside the palace during the Revolution. Of course, she only escaped next door into her husband’s rooms and they were both eventually dragged into Paris and beheaded.

My favorite part of Versailles is still the hall of mirrors and the gardens.

The Marble Courtyard

Hall of Mirrors

After we finished our tour inside, we had a traditional lunch of ham and cheese baguettes out in the gardens. The sun was shining, the fountains were on, and classical music was playing throughout the grounds. David and Jeremy were even inspired enough to dance along to the music!

This was my third visit to Versailles and in all the times I’d been before, I had never been to the Grand or Petit Trianons. I just finished reading Madame Tussaud, a historical fiction novel centered around Madame Tussaud’s life during the French Revolution. Before she became the most famous wax artist in the world, she was tutor to Elisabeth, King Louis XVI’s sister, at Versailles. The Trianons are a central location in the book so this time we paid the extra Euros to visit the Petit Trianon.

The Petit Trianon was Marie Antoinette’s miniature palace, where she went to escape the demands of palace life and the court. Or as Molly put it, “to escape all of those tour groups.”

Petit Trianon

The actual palace was not that amazing… In fact, it was fairly empty, except for the queen’s bed and a GIANT pool table in the billiards room. But the grounds were gorgeous! There is a Temple of Love next to a little pond, and in the back Marie designed an entire farming village complete with cows and goats and chickens, a mill, and cottages. It was an actual working farm two hundred years ago, and it looks like it is still functioning as one today.

The Belvedere

Marlborough Tower

On the way back to Versailles, we decided to rent a canoe out on the lake. David loves to row, so he took over and graciously rowed us around the lake for half an hour. During this time, he transformed himself into Jeeves. He stayed in character the entire time.

After we had worked up our hunger (especially our rower Jeeves, and Molly, who was eating for two) we headed back into the city to Relais de Venise, an all-you-can-eat steak restaurant. The place is extremely popular in Paris but they do not take reservations. So we waited in line for about an hour. And by we, I mean the men. Molly and I found some chairs near the restaurant and parked ourselves there. After all, she couldn’t be on her feet for that long and I had to keep her company!

This is where we (the guys) encountered our second Parisian line-cutter. After an hour in line, we still weren't to the front yet but a table became available outside the café. Out of nowhere a young man escorted his sister and mother to the table and just sat down. They didn’t wait for the hostess to seat them or anything. They just came from the back of the line and took the table for themselves. David was FURIOUS. But we weren’t even in the front yet, and if the people at the front of the line weren’t going to say anything, we weren’t. Plus we kept telling ourselves we didn’t want to eat outside with a long line of hungry people watching us anyway.

Now, this was not a typical American all-you-can-eat restaurant. There was no buffet. We sat at tables and had bread, salad, and wine. Then the waitress brought over a cart full of steak with special green sauce. And every so often, she’d walk by with a huge platter of frites (French fries) and pile them onto our plates. When we asked her what the green sauce was, she swore she didn’t know and refused to talk to us about it. Then Molly asked for ketchup, and she refused to talk to us altogether.  Just kidding!  But she was quite offended... 

On Sunday, we tried to make the most out of the Sylestine’s last day in Europe by seeing all the sites in Paris they hadn’t already covered. Molly was such a trooper walking all over the city, especially in the heat. But she did threaten to throw me over the side of the Eiffel Tower when I suggested we walk up instead of stand in line for the elevator. Luckily for her (and me!), they weren’t allowing anyone to walk up on Sunday, just down. And down was pretty easy, even for Baby S.

We started off Sunday morning on the Ile de la Cite, the tiny island in the middle of the Seine that houses Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame. We were going to eat breakfast first, but when we saw how short the line was for Sainte Chapelle, we took a detour into the church. I had never been to Sainte Chapelle before and it was really beautiful. The chapel was built by Louis IX, or Saint Louis, to house holy relics from Constantinople like the crown of thorns and a piece of Christ’s cross. Once I heard about this, I felt really bad because I realized maybe all of those ‘relics’ we saw in Istanbul (aka Constantinople) were legit! And I totally doubted it at Topkapi Palace and in this blog. Oops!

Rose Window

After Sainte Chapelle we stopped for brunch at a nearby café on the Seine. I had a delicious croque monsieur and the rest of the group had crepes. Then we hopped on the metro and headed to the Catacombs, where we ran into our third and final line-cutter.

The line to the catacombs was outrageous! We heard some man mumble, “Damn History Channel special!” so we figured there was some kind of show on the Paris catacombs and now it’s super popular. Because when I visited six years ago, I hadn’t even really heard of the place and there was no line.

This line wrapped around the corner from the entrance and then down the street! It was so much worse than Westminster Abbey the previous weekend, though probably not as bad as Versailles. But David kept us all entertained when he saw a piece of paper taped to a utility box. Some people had been playing tic-tac-toe. David quickly asked for a pen and jotted down some Catacomb jokes in the leftover blank spaces:

'Why didn’t the skeleton go to the prom?... Because he had no body to go with!'

'Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road?... Because he didn’t have any guts!'

Then he also wrote down ‘3 hours from this point.’ We must have been really bored, because we thought he was hilarious. But once we moved past the utility box, Molly got tired of waiting and wandered down the street to the local patisserie to pick us up some macaroons. Yay!

Meanwhile David spotted a bench with the perfect vantage point of his utility box. So he perched on the bench with Molly and ate macaroons, watching all the passer-by’s and their reactions to his jokes. It was so funny! Some people actually looked at their watches, others laughed, and one woman even took a picture of his work and then showed her husband. After he was done reading, they laughed together and hugged. David likes to think he saved their marriage.

Eventually we made it to the very front of the line (after waiting for well over an hour). Right as we were about to enter the ticketing office, a young couple appeared in front of us. We hadn’t been paying that much attention (David’s next utility box customers distracted us). But when we turned back around, we definitely did not recognize the backs in front of us! Immediately Jeremy (very loudly) asked them if they really just cut in front of us. They kind of snickered (the nerve!) and kept looking straight ahead. Then Jeremy pronounced he wasn’t above shaming someone out of line. Finally, the guy turned around and said sorry and patted Jeremy’s shoulder… but stayed in line! WHAT?! That was it! While the guys rallied the Americans in line behind us to gang up on the cutters and get them out of line, Molly and I jumped in front of them and stated that they were not cutting, but if the people behind us wanted to let them in, that was fine. Finally, the girlfriend turned around and tried to play the whole thing off by claiming, “We didn’t realize there was a line.” REALLY?! You didn’t see all 300 people standing around in line-formation around the building and down the street when you walked up? REALLY?! Well, that was enough to get them to leave. So they did. We shamed them all the way to the back of the line and prayed that David’s prophesy of ‘3 hours from here’ on the utility box would come true.

We were all still shaking from anger when we entered the catacombs, but we pulled ourselves together in time to enjoy the creepiness. Well, almost all of us. Molly was really creeped out. See, about 200 years ago, the city cemetery was too full. So literally millions of bones (around 6 million people total) were transported to tunnels deep underground (much further underground than the sewers or metro system). It took over a year to carry all of the bones and rotting corpses across the city at night to their new home. There are lots of interesting facts about the catacombs though. For instance, Charles X used to throw parties down there and even today people manage to sneak in and have parties (champagne bottles are frequently found). And during WWII, the French Resistance used the tunnel system as their headquarters. The system was also described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables.

Passage down into the catacombs

It tooks years to carve this castle into the rock

Bones of victims of the French Revolution

After being in the dark underground for over an hour, we needed some sunshine. So we walked through the Luxembourg gardens headed to St Sulpice, the church made famous in The Da Vinci Code for containing the Rose Line and an obelisk sundial contraption.

Luxembourg Gardens and Palais du Luxembourg, today's Senate building

Pantheon

Altar of St Sulpice

On our way, we stopped at La Closerie des Lilas, a cute garden restaurant where famous men like Picasso and Ernest Hemingway used to drink. We got some drinks ourselves and I ordered crème brulee.

The Sylestines wanted to end their trip at the Eiffel Tower at night, so we picked up a couple of bottles of wine and headed to dinner. We still had a few hours before the sunset so we ate at a tourist trap and relaxed. We must’ve had too much sun and wine and gotten restless because eventually we started acting pretty goofy. Plus our waiter was ridiculous. He kept randomly walking past our table and singing to us, so David got into the spirit of things and sang him a song in Frenglish…

Eventually we left and walked down the street to the Eiffel tower. We got to experience the sunset and the tower lit up at night. Even though David is terrified of heights and hated the journey to the tippy top and the walk back down, we had a lot of fun.

The next day, the Sylestines sadly had to head back to Austin and David and I took it easy. We knew we would be back to Paris in about two weeks when my family came to visit, so we didn’t feel like we needed to rush around and see everything. So we walked to my favorite place in Paris, La Place de la Concorde, to see the Egyptian obelisk from Luxor. Then we walked through the Tuilleries gardens down to the Opera house, and circled back around to the Madeleine Church and picked up macaroons at Laduree.

Place de la Concorde

Singing "Au Champs Elysees" on the Champs Elysees

La Madeleine

Eating madeleines on the steps of La Madeleine

While on the Rue Royal near Laduree, we saw the most amazing thing – a dog walking another dog.

See, there was a dog-walker with about 8 dogs in his pack. But we noticed some of them weren’t even wearing leashes (they were walking themselves) and one dog was carrying another leash in his mouth. I was so amazed that we followed them all the way down the street. At one point, the dog that was being walked by his dog friend tried to go the wrong way. So the dog dog-walker yanked him back on track. And then the leash got tangled in the dog's legs and the dog dog-walker somehow got him untangled. CRAZY! I would love to have that dog walker’s job. He didn’t even really have to do anything! Most dogs walked themselves, or others.

That was about all my mind could handle, so David and I headed back to the apartment to pick up our bags and then caught the Eurostar back home to London.  Our trip was great!  Definitely not a...