London: Paris!! (8 years later edition)

From Bryan: This post has been sitting in my To Do inbox since January 15th, 2019, and is written about our trip from 8 months prior to that. Since then we've: had a child (who just graduated from Kindergarten two weeks ago), lost a cat, gained two cats, bought a house then sold our first one (in that order!), gained a third cat, and returned to England for our 2nd trip (my 3rd) to celebrate our 10th anniversary! For the last 7 years I've been telling myself I'll add some pictures to this and upload it one day, but I never never got around to it (mostly because curating the photos is a chore — I alone took 1,200 pictures in May 2018!). Well today I finally realized I could just... post it. And then once I started editing I realized, well it's not really that much more work to pick out photos. So it turns out all I needed to do this last three-quarters of a decade was just start.

So without further ado (you've been waiting long enough): the next post in our London series.

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Guess what Wednesday was?! PARIS!!!! Je suis enthousiaste!

I, for one, was very excited to get to France and check out Paris. So excited, in fact, that it was a breeze to wake up at 3am London time to get ready and out the door by 4am! Of course, it was a bit of a run-around to get there in time because it was too early for a tube. So, we hopped on a bus to take us to the St. Pancras station so we could catch the early Eurostar to Paris. Once we got through ticketing and border control, we waited for our 5:40 train in a pretty crowded waiting area.

Once they gave us the go-ahead to board, it was a free-for-all as people crammed their way up the walkway and onto the train. It seemed like we were only seated for 5 minutes before the train started also, so I know why everyone was in a rush! It didn’t much matter to us, though, as we slept through the whole trip (after scarfing our donuts from the day before, of course!).

We arrived at 9am Paris time and headed out into the zoo of France. We stepped out of the station and it hit me just how out of sorts we were. I hadn’t learned enough French to be able to read the signs or understand what they were saying. Luckily, Bryan has a good memory and knew enough to get us around. (Bryan: I have a horrible memory! But I'm a chronic over-planner, down to the point of writing down street-by-street directions for the itinerary I created.)

So, we hopped on a bus to our first stop and set off walking. The buildings were gorgeous! We saw the Hôtel de Ville and the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and so much more! (Bryan: we didn't go in the cathedral itself, but even all these years later my most distinct memory is of trying to ask the tour guide at the entrance where the nearest bathroom is. She just so happened to be the only guide at one of the busiest tourist attractions in Paris who didn't speak a lick of English or French! We had to ask someone else.)

We even visited an underground crypt of an old city that was found only recently (It was a museum of ruins from Gallo-Roman Lutetia!).

After the crypt, we headed to the river and found a place for lunch: La Bucherie. Bryan had a sugar crepe and tea while I had a jambon-beurre, which is a ham, cheese, and butter baguette. This sandwich ended up being the best thing I had in Paris! Even coming home to Ohio, I make these sandwiches many times to this day! At the restaurant, I also had an ice water that I apparently made up wrong. So, they don’t have iced water in London or Paris. You have to ask for ice with your tap water or else you get lukewarm water. I had learned this by then, so I asked for iced water. The waiter (who spoke a minimum of 6 languages, by the way), brought me a glass of water and a glass of ice with a spoon. In his mind, I was supposed to scoop the ice into my water with the spoon. In my eyes, I poured the water into the glass of ice. It resulted in a few weird looks, but I had my iced water, so I was happy!

Following lunch, we walked by the Shakespeare & Company Bookstore and the Panthéon! The Shakespeare bookstore was so huge! Plus, the Panthéon is just amazing to look at even from the outside! This Shakespeare lover was very excited to see both buildings!

We got lost just a few times (we did not! We just took the scenic route and sometimes saw things from more than one angle), but eventually found our way to Luxemburg Palace where we got some great shots!

Afterwards, we headed to the Musée de Minéralogie where we saw TONS (and I mean TOOOOOONS) of rocks and minerals. I might have been in heaven…. (Two things that stood out to me about this one. First, the absolutely nicest lady at the reception desk spoke about as much English as I did French... apparently the minerology museum at the Paris School of Mines isn't a very big tourist draw. But we managed to communicate well enough to buy tickets and find the entrance. Second thing, I knew Tashia was a huge rock nerd so I took her here as a pre-apology for sticking with me on a later stop on our itinerary...)

Our next stop was slightly bittersweet (all bitter! no sweet!). We took a bus to the catacombs that Bryan had been super excited to see, only to find that the workers decided that would be a great day to go on strike….because they had to do their jobs. (When we got to the site there were a couple of guys sitting around a motorcycle, chatting, and smoking. When we asked what was going on they handed us a paper with a list of demands and we figured out these must be the striking workers. I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of the overworked and underpaid, but among the reasons listed for their strike were the dark working conditions (at their job that necessarily is entirely underground!) and breathing in air of "decompositing bones) (at their job that is necessarily entirely within a crypt!). They also complained about only making 60 EUR per month at a time when the national minimum wage was €9.88, implying a grueling less than 2 hour work day, 1 day a week. Yes, I'm still bitter about this.)

So, we sucked it up and headed onward to wait for the next bus. While waiting, we found a patisserie and bought this sausage in a roll thing, which was good, but just ended up being a hot dog in a long croissant-esque roll. We eventually made our way back to the river and walked along it to La Petit Palais followed by La Gran Palais, both of which were gorgeous!

(For some reason, Tashia didn't write about the next stop on our trip, so I guess that's up to me. Remember that pre-apology I mentioned before? Well one of the weird and wonderful attractions I really wanted to see was the Musée des Égouts, or the Paris Sewer Museum, where you get to go down into the real live sewers beneath Paris! I've always found the behind-the-scenes of things almost as interesting, or in some cases more interesting, than the front of house. I should mention now that you know your wife loves you (and that she's a keeper) when she happily agrees to go to a museum where there's a very real and significant chance you might take a selfie with poop.

It was really fascinating walking beneath the city, through tunnels most people on the surface never think about but couldn't live without, learning about centuries of history and civil infrastructure engineering. But I have to say the strongest memory I have about it is that we just barely made it to the ticket booth before the 5pm cut off for entry. Since we were the last ones in the museum, the staff kept locking the doors behind us. We never felt rushed, but every time we'd turn a corner we'd hear a creeeeeeeeak CLANG then the jingle of keys in a padlock. I was pretty sure I didn't lead us into a creepy subterranean Parisian adventure (that was supposed to happen in the catacombs), but I didn't know for sure until we saw daylight again).

From here, it was time to hit the Eiffel Tower! However, this ended up being much less cool than we hoped. It was a very brown color and surrounded by construction barriers. We decided not to wait in the huge line of people waiting to go to the top. Instead, we relaxed a bit down on the ground, found some souvenirs, and then made out way through the part behind the tower. Once we made it out of the sea of people selling knock-off Eiffel Tower trinkets to the tourists willing to buy them, we grabbed a crepe at the only food vendor we saw and continued our walk through the park, which had the better photo shots of the Tower.

That’s when things got interesting….We were stopped by a caricature artist who tried to scam us for 70 Euros. He started off saying he did the drawings and then took whatever donations people gave. Then he started drawing before we could really say no. He kept saying he was going to make me look super sexy and Bryan really handsome and kept telling Bryan to go ahead and finish the crepe we had bought. Honestly, it was very awkward. And then he turned the picture around….

I can say that it was the hardest test of my life not laughing in this man’s face. But then all the laughter got caught in my throat when he said he normally charges 50 Euros per person, but for us, he would do 70 total. He didn’t know these tourists though, because Bryan had 5 Euros in his wallet and I had a couple coins in my pocket. And that’s all he got! We dropped it in his hand and walked on as he muttered behind us.

Whew, that weirdo taken care of, we headed to the metro after stopping for a few more souvenirs. However, once we got to the entrance, there were police there rerouting everyone to different entrances. Apparently someone had died on the tracks we wanted to take!!!! I don’t know how recently, but I was almost grateful for the crazy man who just had to draw us at the Eiffel tower because we might have been down below when it happened if not. Many prayers for this person’s family and those who were in the vicinity when it happened.

Gathering ourselves and heading on past this, we had a tough time getting to the rerouted tracks, but eventually made it back to the Eurostar an hour early. Once we got through Border Control, we grabbed some food to eat while waiting. Bryan had a quiche, I had a salami, pickle, and butter baguette (the jambon-beurre’s brother!), and we both shared some bottled water and a croissant.

We jumped back on the train to travel the 2 hours to London. Bryan fell asleep, but I was still wide awake, so I did word puzzles the whole way. Once we got to London, it was straight on the tube to head to our home station and then walked home to get a good shower and some sleep!

I kept a travel journal while we were in London, so it has helped to remember everything that happened. On the entry for Wednesday, I apparently had some special take-aways to share:

• I love the French-style sandwiches!

• Probably don’t need to visit Paris again (though thinking back on it now, I’d definitely want to go again, just to different areas).

• Eiffel Tower --> kinda a let down (and I agree with this still)

• Bus system was easier (and I still have a few unused bus tickets from Paris!)

• Food was easy to find, except what you’re specifically looking for (all I wanted was some macarons!!)

(Though we did find some pre-boxed macarons at a souvenir store! But that's all for now. Until next time!)