Typically, on the train, as on the plane flights so far, I slept for a bit, then woke up, then drifted in and out, then slept again for a bit, while Alice slept like a log.
I was on the middle bunk with Alice above and Tom below so I turned around in my bed to point my head out the window and inched the blind open a little bit. Out there was the misty French countryside.
About half an hour later the others woke up. Tom turned himself around as well, while Alice, who really wanted top bunk, now didn’t have a window to look out of.
We were due in at Paris (Bercy) at 9.47, where Tom had to catch a metro halfway across Paris, to get on another train about 45 minutes later bound for London, and then another train up to Norwich. We passed the time with uninformed speculation on the secenery, e.g.
G: Did you see the Renault factory over there?
T: Where? No.
G: Just back a bit. I saw a huge carpark full of Renaults so I assumed it was a factory.
T: Or a collector with very little imagination…
And so on.
At Bercy station we wished each other luck, and he went one way while we went into the cool cloud-ish gray-ish morning to find out which Metro station we needed to somewhere near our hotel. At the metro station there was a small but slow moving line of people who just couldn’t work out how to buy a ticket from the machine. One group of four men took (no not exaggerating) a little bit more than 10 minutes to get themselves organised.
The system is slightly confusing at first, although it has a great advantage over Sydney in that there are multiple connecting points between each of the lines. So typically to get from A to B you have to change at F, but it’s usually only 5 or 6 stops, and doesn’t take very long. A single trip (any trip) is 1.60€, which could get you from one side of Paris to the other. And anyway, we knew we wouldn’t be able to check in to our hotel for a while so we had time to waste.
We found the place, left our bags, didn’t pay up front (as we had to in Italy), and then set to exploring for an hour or so. The Rue de Seine is your typical Parisian street (but aren’t they all?) Greengrocer, 39 coffee and pastry shops, a supermarket, people standing in the street arguing, chairs at the cafes pointed out towards the people, not towards the tables or the shop.
We walked up to the river, sat on one of the bridges and ate some more snacks – is it legal to import Italian biscuits into France? – and then had a look at the outside of the Louvre (closed every Tuesday) and the famous Pyramid, then walked towards the Arc de Triomphe where there is a large, flat round fountain, where someone has helpfully placed a large number of heavy metal chairs. Normal procedure is to pull up a chair facing the fountain and relax.
Now here comes the really good news. Our hotel room has a bath! A deep bath too. And although there is a shower head there’s no curtain or spray-guard or similar; it’s like they’ve put in the shower head later and said ‘Sure but who’s going to use it?’
After a nice long bath and a kip we were feeling pretty good about Paris (but also very hungry) so we bought a loaf of bread, cheese, quinoa salad, roast vegetable salad, a sizeable bag of croissants, a pack of yoghurts, and a cheap bottle of wine from the supermarket across the road for 21€. Bread, cheese, salad and wine for lunch… nice.
Washed and fed, we walked down the left bank to the english-language – and english twit staffed ‘oh where do you go for coffee in Paris, there’s only one place!’ – bookshop called Shakespeare and Co., then headed across the river to Notre Dame, where we went in and watched most of a service, then set sails for the Eiffel Tower. You expect it to be big, as it is a monument to French…er, greatness?… but because it is so damned huge, it looks closer than it is. Then, when you have walked about half way there, and your feet hurt and you’re thirsty, it still looks closer than it is.
Then, when you arrive there, you realise just how vastly large it actually is. Not just how high, but the size of the space underneath the four pillars at the bottom, and the size of the actual pillars, is really amazing. So we sat and looked at it for a bit, and I wandered around and took about 8 million photos while Alice read a book. She took her 8 million photos and then read her book last year, so this year she decided to skip forward to just reading her book. At 8.30pm the line to go up the stairs or in the lift for any of the four pillars was still huge, so we gave up on that and found the closest metro stop to get back to our hotel. This turned out to be Montparnasse, but changing lines when we got there involved walking this way and that through numerous tunnels, and after about 10 minutes we actually arrived at our platform.
Dinner from the supermarket (lentil salad and rice on bread) was 3€, and then we discovered, after much impatience, that the wireless internet reception works perfectly well on one side of the 2m x 4m breakfast room upstairs and very intermittently on the other side.
Final observation for today: the bums in Paris really are crazy. The ones that weren’t talking to themselves were usually swearing at someone else.
Greg
