Paris , Day 1: Make That Rare

We're on the first leg of our journey, heading toward Toronto on a small plane.  Amy points to my seat number, "2B".  She says, "You have the Shakespeare seat!" 

Hmmmm.  After a minutes thought, I realize ... she's the perfect traveling companion.

After puddle-jumping to Toronto, we shift into a 777 on our way to Paris.  We have neck pillows, two ipods with splitters, trail mix and water.  We are so ready!  And I think about how we got here.  It was on the way to Bob Dylan concert when Amy asks me, "So what do you want to do for Labor Day?"  And I reply, "Oh I don't know, we could climb another peak."  "We could go to Montreal," she countered.  "Or Paris." I said.  And we looked at each other and said, "Is there any reason why we can't?"  Nope.

And so after a leisurely dinner (Air Canada is really good at this, by the way), we fall asleep.  Kind of.  Then an hour and a half later, the captain wakes us up.  "Time for breakfast!  We'll be in Paris an hour early because of the head wind."  We land in Paris at 7:30 their time, the sun is coming up over the city of lights.   The day has just begun and we have an hour and a half of really bad sleep.  How could we possibly do this?

The Eiffel Tower: It's Big

We deposit our bags in the Hotel St. Dominique around ten and start walking toward the city.  I have my map, and I figure if we walk West we gotta hit the Eiffel Tower sooner or later.  But the buildings were so close together (though low) it was impossible  to tell where it is. 

Then as we turn a corner, like Godzilla, it appears in the horizon.  I gasped.  "OHMIGOD!"  I poke Amy.  She laughs and starts clapping her hands.  We dodge around buildings and streets until it appears in full view.

And lemme tell you.   This thing is HUGE!  Like most everyone, I walked around with a vision of the Eiffel Tower in my head as sort of a symbol.  A couple of curved lines and some straight lines across it.  But it is ornate.  Extremely detailed.  It's not like a skyscraper where the lines are clean and manufactured.  It's not a statue.  It's a real work of architecture.   The names of 72 French scientists are plastered around the outside. 

Amy and I walk around the entire thing, through the middle, looking it over from all sides, and we were in awe.   We saw elevators going up on two pillars, and one set of steps with people walking up.  "Do you want to climb it?" I ask.  Yeah right   With an hour and a half of sleep.  We defer it for later.

We have our first French meal at a small café.  I have a Parisian salad, which is your garden variety bed of greens but with boiled potatoes and green beans.  Amy has sausage, pork and lentils, which have this country-ish flavor that I find totally charming.  That a couple of bottles of Perrier, and I'm settling in.  We people-watched for a long time.  Amy notices every third person was carrying a baguette, and most had a bite taken out of the top end.  Hmmmm.  This could be useful information later.

Getting Our Bearings

We decide to fight our jet leg with an extra hour of sleep in the hotel.  Bright eyed and bushy tailed, we head out of our small hotel room ready for action.  Amy and I mapped out all the things we wanted to see beforehand, and see what the walking distance was like for everything.  So we walk along the Seine.  About every block or so, our mouths drop open.

• The Alexander III bridge is crowned with four gold plated  statues, one on each corner, made of gold
• The Grand Palace has four horses and a charioteer leaping out of the building above, practically suspended in the sky above.
• The Louvre, which seems to go on forever.  
• Book Sellers along the Seine 
• And then there was Notre Dame.  We looked around the outside to get a view of it.  There's about 10 million details in the architecture.  It's gonna take at least a day to figure it out, but Amy and I are both tremendously impressed.   This is no ordinary cathedral here.  

 

Our brains were fried.  Which of course reminded us of food, and off we went to the first of our restaurant recommendations, La Bistrot De Paris (pretty boastful in a city full of Bistros.)   There I discover Kir, a beautiful pre-dinner drink of white wine mixed with cassis liqueur.  It's a little sweet, but not terribly so, and I vow to have it before every dinner in Paris.  Amy ordered duck, but when it came it looked suspiciously like rare beef.   We kept takeing turns tasting it, trying to figure out whether it was a steak, but its finishing taste was so much like duck, so we kind of believed it.    It was served on basmati rice with a very subtle un-basmati flavors in it.  Me - I had albacore tuna, extremely rare (this is France, after all).  So delicious, it melted in my mouth.  It was about 10,000 miles away from the tuna salad sandwiches that fueled my childhood years.  And we washed it down with white burgundy that was so dry and crisp and clean … we were reminded this was France. 

Tired but full, at 10:00 we made our way back to the Eiffel Tower to watch it light up.  The lights make it larger, and then a bunch of sparking lights turn all the blocks around it into a giant dance floor.  (No one was actually dancing).  Amy and I were amazed and exhausted.   We dragged ourselves back to the hotel for a good night sleep.