Paris, Day two. Bus tours, mad roundabouts, and radio towers…

Hi Everybody,

First of all, let me say a HUGE g’day to all my old University colleagues, who just got together for our 10 year reunion.  Sorry we couldn’t be there guys, us being here and you being there, and not enough money at the time to make the two meet.  I hope it was a lot of fun.

On with the show…

We got up at around 8:00am so we could get down and have breakfast before heading out into Paris.  The breakfast was fairly simple, cereal, various breads (including croissonts, of course), juices, and tea of coffee.  We pretty well dug into all the above to ensure we would have enough energy to cope through the first part of the day.  We were anticipating doing a lot of walking around.
The Kitchen staff were very nice and polite, as we were to them.  I thought, considering how many people the staff would have to prepare and wash-up for, and seeing the size of the hotels kitchen, which was no bigger than most small household kitchens, I thought they did quite well keeping such a cheerful attitude.  The hotel at any time seemed to have around 30 or so guest, so it have to deal with that many peoples dirty utensils and plates over the course of perhaps two hours, I tip my hat to them.
Oh, a small tip for all planning to travel to France, or more accurately in our case, Paris. Learn the Language, if not that, know some of it that you can at least get across the gist of what you would like.  Like most countries, speaking in a totally foreign language doesn’t get you very far, and people can get rather tetchy.  We found that people were more receptive to you if you tried to speak in their language first.  If you just dived into English, they usually had no idea what you were saying and, were pretty quick to dismiss you.  As we had a little bit of french under our belts, we were able to sort of communicate with people, and they at least seemed to appreciate us trying to speak to them in their native tongue.
Back to the day. After having a full breakfast, we consulted the maps and found that we should be able to get on a tour bus that travels around Paris.  This bus worked in conjunction with about three other bus routes, allowing passengers to jump off and on each of them, seeing all the sights of Paris.  The plan was to get a day pass for us both, and do just that.  We wandered down the hill through the back streets until we got to a main boulevard, Boulevard de Clichy to be precise, where if any one has been here before, sits the world famous Moulin Rouge.  While we waited for the bus, we took some pictures like all the rest of the tourists.  Please find attached said pictures.

 The red windmill

 The neon sign

 Some of the artwork in the main entry

Our tour-bus eventually turned up, and we jumped on.  I got a bit confused with the pricing, never quite getting the knack of understanding french spoken at normal speeds, but eventually got it worked out.  I was a bit worried that my English Visa debit card wouldn’t work over here, but it seems Visa is happily accepted anywhere.  After we sat down, we quickly discovered that it would be better for us to get a two day ticket instead of one, since we had quite a lot to see, and definitely wouldn’t see it all in one day.  The bus-driver wasn’t able to change the tickets, but let us know we could jump off at their head office bus stop, and the tickets could be changed there.
This particular bus was the L’OpenTour Yellow bus, which went through Montmartre (where our hotel was) and travelled down the Grands Boulevards. It circled down passed the two big train stations of Gare du Nord, and Gare du l’est, turn at the Place de la Republique, and headed toward Place de la Madeleine, where it would loop back again.  At that point we jumped off to change our tickets at the head office, and went to go hop on the other bus.  At the Head office, we also discovered a handy two day pass book which allowed you to go into a vast number of the Museums throughout Paris.  We thought that was a great idea, and got them.  The book pass was flexible enough to allow us to choose  which day to start using it, as we planned to use today as a scouting day, and then use the passes tomorrow.

 Kathleen blew a kiss to him, but I think he wanted money

 Eglise de Madeleine

 Evidence of the beautiful weather

We had a little walk down pass La Madeleine to Place de la Concorde, which has in the centre of it a huge Obelisk.  For anyone that has read “The Da Vinci Code”, one of Paris’ past Presidents, Francois Mitterrand, had a bit of a fancy for Egypt, and filled Paris with all sorts of Egyptian stuff, to the criticism of many.  The Obelisk is decorated with various Egyptian symbols and pictures, one side having the details for one of the great boats of the Pharaohs.

 La Place de la Concorde

 The Obelisk

 Detail on the side of the Obelisk
We then walked along the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, a quite long stretch of road from the Place de la Concorde straight to the Arc de Triomphe. Half the Avenue des Champs-Elysees stretches through gardens, while the rest of it is lined with various stores and cafes.
As we were more exploring than shopping, we just kept walking, and walking, and walking.  At some points the only thing I was interested in was the fact that the Arc de Triomphe was getting bigger, hence we were getting closer to it.  Eventually, we did get to the Arc, and witnessed the organised chaos which is the Arc de Triomphe roundabout.  Again, no lines, people drove onto it when the lights told them to, and if you were on the roundabout, you had to stop for them, or else plow into them.  At first glance, I was quite horrified by how it was meant to work, yet, somehow it did.  Though, I can tell you, there are many a near miss.

 Avenue des Champs-Elysees

 La Arc de Triomphe (and some of the madness that surrounds it)

 Some of the detail on the Arc
The next bus we jumped on (much to my gratitude) was the Green bus (I sort of feel like I’m in a Dr Zeus book).  This bus was the PARIS GRAND TOUR bus, for it took you to practically all the big tourist sites of Paris.  We let it take us round, passing the Trocadero, which houses a range of museums, a big radio antenna better known as the Eiffel Tower (more on that later), and the Hotel des Invalides.  Since we wanted to have a quick passing look at some other major sites, we jumped off this bus to get on the orange bus which took us past Notre Dame.  By this time, it was starting to get very late in the afternoon, and unfortunately, the bus services stopped running around 6pm.  Personally I would have thought, since it was daylight until almost 11pm during the summer time, having the tourists riding until they couldn’t see anymore would be more profitable.  Hey, who am I to judge. We had to skip going onto the final bus route, the blue bus, and travel back to our final planned destination, the top of the Eiffel Tower.

 Some Paris architecture

 Some more architecture

 La Palais Bourbon Assemblee Nationale

 Hotel du Invalides (looked swanky)

 Notre Dame

 As much as I looked, not a Hunchback in sight

 Le Seine, the canal/river that runs through Paris.

 The big radio mast itself, the Eiffel Tower.
I always find it fascinating, and rather funny, to think that at one point the powers-that-be considered demolishing the Eiffel Tower, until someone thought it would be a great place to put a radio tower.  Not saying that the two are directly connected, but considering how much people come to Paris, sometimes just to see and climb the Eiffel tower, I wonder how many officials have looked back thinking “Mon Dieu, Tis a bon thing we didn’t hire la Frere Dean” (hopefully you Brisbanites should appreciate that joke).
The Tower is everything we expected, a marvel of steel, and bloody big. When we first passed it on the tour bus, the huge courtyard under the tower was packed with lines of people wanting to go up.  When we came back, it hadn’t really thinned.  Resigning to our fate, we joined one of the lines.  It turned out that they processed the people fairly fast, so we didn’t have to wait too long before we were able to get a ticket.  Unfortunately, we had hoped to get elevator tickets, but I think due to our lack of french, and the ticket operator’s lack of courtesy, we only got stairs tickets.  That proved to be a bit of exercise, while I’m sure most beneficial to our leg muscles, its something we could have done without, as Kathleen had to stop regularly to catch her breath or suffer an asthma attack.
Now, there are three levels to the Eiffel Tower, the first two of those having both stairs and elevator.  Due to our little misunderstanding, we had to take all 695 steps to the second level’s elevator (which you have to buy another ticket) to which we rode to the third and highest floor.  There is actually a restaurant on the second floor, but we didn’t partake, as I had heard that it was ridiculously expensive.  Besides, I’m sure we could find something just as good (and without need of a small fortune) somewhere back near our hotel. 
Up on the top floor, you get a panoramic view of the entire city.  they’ve got pictures of this view all around the inner deck, labelling all the landmarks.  Above the windows, they have the distances from the tower to various cities throughout the world.  We couldn’t help but take note of two particular cities shown.
There is a viewing deck all around the top floor, giving you a much better view.
We ended up staying up there to watch the sunset.  It was quite beautiful.  I found it quite interesting at how many people came up just to see it.  It got quite packed in the end.

 from the second floor

 La Place du Trocadero

 Place de Varsovie

 Allee des Cygnes

 Lets hope someone wasn’t arrested for that one

 Ecole Militaire

 Paris

 Stade Emile Anthoine

 More Paris

 Parc du Champ de Mars

 Tombeau de Napoleon

 Our capital (just in case you thought it was Disneyland)

 Google Earth says the same (give or take)

 Ah, L’amour

 oooooh…… aaaaaah….

 Sunset

 Practically over
Once the show was over, it was well past 10pm, and we thought it was a good time to head back down. We could have taken the elevator from the second floor down to the first, but it seemed to be taking quite a long time, so we took the stairs, but was able to take the elevator down from the first floor to the ground level.  Once we got out, we were practically swamped by a variety of merchants, trying to sell us various types of souvenirs. Not wanting a Glowing Eiffel tower, I did my best to seem as uninterested and intimidating as possible, but they had long since learned that their best bet was the females of a party. While I was distracted, one selling roses had managed to give one to Kathleen, and I had to pay for it.  Sneaky Bugger.  Oh, well, where better to get a rose than at the Eiffel Tower (even if I could have bought a whole dozen for what I paid for that one). 

 The tower’s glow

 The tower’s underbelly

 Lights spectacular

Since all the Tourist buses had long since stopped running, we thought it might be worthwhile trying out the metro system.  For those not familiar with the term, its their train/subway system (mainly subway, with some above ground stops).  For all the computer savvy ones out there, you would know about some colour systems using 255 different levels of Blue, Red, and green.  Well, I think the Parisian railway came bloody close to using every single variance of those colour types when making the guide map of their rail system. I exaggerated, but going on 11pm, and being very tired from walking up and down a whole lot of steps, I felt Jackson Pollock would be giving it a double take.  After quite a bit of time interpreting the map, we took what we thought was the right direction, and headed for a platform.
The subways are quite well set out in Paris, much like London.  They are very regular, almost every 4-8 minutes (being such a large city, I guess they can afford to run so often).  We jumped on a train, but after a couple stops, I discovered we had gotten on the wrong one.  It turns out my colour blindness foiled me again, but we quickly worked out where we were, where we needed to go, and switched trains to the right one.  We arrived at our stop, only to discover it must be one level away from the deepest pit of hell, as we had to climb a never ending spiral staircase to get to the surface. By the time we got to the top, all we wanted was to get back to the hotel and die (or better yet, just sleep).  Its ok, we took an appropriate breather, and made it back to our room for baths, and try to get some sleep from what was left of the night (it was about 1:30am by that time).

Tune in next time, people, for Day 3,  glass pyramids, quirky grins, and panoramic water paintings.

Love,

Kathleen and Keith