Well, I managed to get my sister Beth Ann and niece Lydia to/from/around Paris via the RER train, subway, city bus, tour bus, taxi and feet during their 3 days here! We skipped the tricycle taxi and horse-drawn carriage and rental bicycles and sightseeing boat, but I think we did pretty well! And they got a glimpse of how Parisians live and get around.
Today Lydia wanted to take a photo of the Moulin Rouge (go figure!) so we went up there via the Métro. It was PACKED and at one point it lurched (very unusual), flinging a 75-year-old gentleman in Beth Ann's lap. Now there's a unique story for her to take home!
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Saint Denis was the first Bishop
of Paris. He was martyred in
connection with the Decian
persecution of Christians,
shortly after A.D. 250.
After his head was chopped off,
Denis is said to have picked it up
and walked ten kilometres (six miles),
preaching a sermon the entire way.
Here's his statue on the north portal
of Notre Dame. |
We were going to take the Métro and RER down to the Musée d'Orsay next, but as we were having an Orangina after Lydia's photo shoot, I realized that we could catch the city bus #74 from right where we were down to Hôtel de Ville (city hall), which is just across the river from Notre Dame. Multiple bonuses: we could see even more of the city from the bus, and we'd get a peek at the spectacular Hôtel de Ville, and we'd get to walk across one of the beautiful bridges of Paris and observe life on the water (including seeing an open umbrella floating upside down down the river...quite a fanciful image...one could almost imagine it coming out of a Madeline story!), and we'd walk right past a bunch of gift shops that they wanted to hit. AND they had never been in a church anything like Notre Dame, an awesome (in the true sense of the word) experience in itself.
We stopped for a snack at one of the cafés right outside Notre Dame, and Lydia ordered something I've never had: a French hot dog! It was actually a couple of hot dogs, totaling about 12 inches, on a toasted half-baguette, covered with melted cheese. She said it was very good. Now I gotta order one of those myself!
The "Cars Rouges" tour bus that we used off-and-on yesterday and today dropped us off at the Palais Garnier (the old opera house) at the end of our travels today. As we walked past the front of the building on our way to the Métro to get back to the apartment, we found some young opera singers (very good) performing for the crowd on the front steps. Hey, if it's every opera singer's dream to sing at the Paris Opera, these kids found a way to do it! We listened for a few minutes and Lydia got some video of the performances, and then we made a quick stop at the cash machine and the supermarket on rue Montorgueil on our way back "home."
Lydia was working up a bunch of creative excuses for staying a few days longer, but it was time to pack their bags for an early morning taxi ride back to Aéroport Charles de Gaulle. She'll just have to save her money and come back again to see several things on her list that we couldn't squeeze in plus a ton of things that she didn't know to put on her list. As Beth Ann observed, Lydia has caught the travel bug! And of all the bugs one can catch, it's a pretty good one.
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