Paris Holds the Key to Your Heart (Part Duex)

Saturday morning, exhausted from travelling and walking miles and miles, we all slept in before leisurely making our way over to see the Hunchback at Notre Dame. The thing with Notre Dame is that, like the Eiffel Tower, it's pretty popular, but unlike Feffy, they only let 15 people in once every 15 minutes. At our best spot in line, Meg and I were numbers 98 and 99 (I counted) after already waiting for a half an hour. You do the math - that's not a fun wait. We got bored and rescheduled Quasimodo in for Sunday morning promptly at opening time. We took some pictures of the inside of the cathedral, free and with a much shorter line, and headed over to the Bastille, home of some good old-fashioned revolution.

I, personally, was pretty disappointed to see that the high point of the Bastille was nothing more than a really big column. The little disturbance to which police were called to seemed pretty intriguing, though we left before we could figure out what came of it. Also, everyone was speaking French which isn't too helpful for eavesdropping. Where are you, Berlitz, when I need you? We took the Metro - I rank it second in all of the European tubes I've so far experienced, after the Tube, though it gets much higher points for punctuality - back towards homebase. From there, we found a cafe-thing (brasserie, I think it's called) where everyone had lunch and I had dessert. Yes, amongst all the sandwiches and lunch-y things on our table, sat my wonderfully delicious crepe with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce and whipped cream. When I ordered it, the waiter corrected me and politely said, "But, that's dessert." What a silly man; I knew what I was doing. Mmm.

We visited the Musee d'Orsay and both the Grand and Petit palaces after our afternoon meal. The Grand Palace, which we were lured to by its very fancy glass roof, is now nothing more than a place for exhibitions and our ticket only bought us a walk-through Gupta statue after Gupta statue without any sign of the glass roof. Needless to say, we were pretty disappointed, so we took the Metro back to the hotel for a nap. I napped a little, wrote some postcards, read, and mostly tried to kill 2 hours without eating too many tortilla chips. We met with Meg's parents just before dinner and wandered the Paris streets looking for souvenirs. Then dinner - this time we opted for Italian because it's familiar with little need for translation. It was Italian-y and delicious, but honestly, not as fun as the confusing French meal the night before. Meg and I got McDonalds milkshakes (keeping up my McDonalds in every country goal) and turned in for the evening to play some cards and watch French people dance, sing, and generally be ridiculous on public television. Oh, it's the same in every country.

We greeted Notre Dame exactly 20 minutes before opening time Sunday morning and were exactly 15th and 16th in line. We climbed and climbed and climbed the 422 stairs to the tip-top of the building to see what the gargoyles see. We missed the Great Bell because the sign didn't tell us we could only do the Bell before the top, and after the top we couldn't go back to it. Boo Notre Dame. I bet that's where Quasi was because we never saw the guy. I did see my first French man in a beret though and tactfully took a picture of him. We climbed and climbed and climbed back down the 422 stairs to a dead-end with two doors and a cabinet, none of which opened. Just Meg and I stuck at the bottom of a tower in Notre Dame. Fun. We were joined by two French people and we all kept being exasperated in our own languages and not understanding each other but were clearly not having fun being stuck. The Frenchman finally pushed a button (that Meg pointed out because it looked like an emergency button) and voila! We were free!

To cap off our weekend in Paris, we took a river tour on the Seine. Our attractive guide told us all about everything we'd seen and I got another bajillion shots of everything, especially the Eiffel Tower. I couldn't think of a better way to say goodbye to such a beautiful city. We had lunch in another brasserie near our hotel and headed to the train station around 4. We had a slight kink on the way there because, for some reason or another, there was a parade of every motorcyclist in all of Paris and beyond driving on the road past Nord. I much preferred the runners (the Paris Marathon was also on Sunday - they ran all along the Seine for the majority of the morning) to the loud and in-our-way motorcyclists. Still, we got there and the Eurostar brought us back to London where we were greeted with the news that the predicted Tube strike did not happen. Phew!

[Bonus points for you if you get the title's reference.]

...And pictures of all of Paris, even if you don't get it.