Last full day in Paris…
Having got the gist of the Metro system and sampled the wonders of how fast you can get from one place to another, and be slightly crowded while doing it, today seemed a good day to shoehorn in as many sights of Paris as we could safely shoehorn in. How many is unsafe to shoehorn in?
I don’t know.
We started over at the Gare d’Austerlitz (train station) where we needed to go to book our tickets from Paris to Rotterdam. Some of the tellers at the station have little flags to tell you which languages they can speak, which is too tempting, given we could probably have muddled through in French and need the practice.
Anyway.
One booking later we walked to the Paris Mosque, across the road from which is a neat cafe which serves what is now officially recognised as the best baklava I have yet tasted, as well as pretty good walnut tarts, turkish delight and sweetened peppermint tea. Walking further west we came to a preserved section of the old wall built all the way round Paris in about the year 1200 (to keep the rabbits out), then to the Pantheon (which was a church, then became a place to bury famous dead French people, then became a church again for a little bit, then after that they eventually decided it would definitely be a place to bury famous dead french people). So for instance you can see the tombs of Marie Curie, Emile Zola, and so on.
Unfortunately having arrived late (and started the day late after a bath and lunch and so on) we had to choose between visiting the crypt (which closed at 6 o’clock) or the guided tour up onto the outside of the dome of the pantheon (which started at 5.15 and took roughly 40 minutes). Having been a church, the pantheon is roughly the same shape and plan as St Peters in Rome – cross shape and dome in the middle. Also they have installed Foucault’s pendulum there, which is a device used, in 1850-something – to show that the Earth does rotate. Basically it’s a brass weight on the end of a piece of wire stretching right up to the top of the dome. If the Earth wasn’t moving the pendulum would just rock back and forth in the same spot; of course it doesn’t, it traces a different path each time, moving slightly one way.
Luckily we took the dome tour; the view from up there is breathtaking. Also the first stop is the ‘gallery’ level, which is another level of flooring inside the building but about 3/4 the way up. So you get a god look at the dome and the architectural features and the pendulum and so on.
Then we caught the Metro over to the Place de la Bastille (looking for the remains of said) but I hadn’t done my homework so I didn’t know where exactly to look (and it wasn’t in our guidebook). Apparently there is a small park containing some stones from the original Bastille but we didn’t find it. Instead we went to the Place des Vosges, which is a nice little park, and sat on the grass for a bit.
Another 15-minute Metro trip later we got off the Chales de Gaulle-Etoile station (which is all but under the Arc de Triomphe) crossed under the roadway to the Arc itself, and had a look around/took some photos/whistled the Marsellaise in harmony and with feeling/insert other interesting but made up story here), then ambled down the Champs-Elysees.
That found us back at the large Egyptian-inscribed obelisk, which takes you into the gardens just before the Louvre, and then we were basically back at our hotel. Oddly though, I could swear the sun went down, but it didn’t really get that dark. Maybe it’s a northern europe thing, maybe it’s because every monument has huge floodlights on it and there’s a lot of monuments, or maybe it’s because there’s lot of parks and if it were allowed to get dark then who knows what would happen, but anyway there was a pretty weird twilight going on.
And also lots of people having picnics on all the bridges and on the banks of the seine. And there’s no better spot, really.
Greg
