Neighbourhood of Painters and Poets.
Trip Start
Apr 30, 2004
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13
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Trip End
May 09, 2004
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Paris,
France
Monday, May 3, 2004
We walk a few more yards and arrive at one of the great sights of Paris, Sacré-Coeur. http://www.paris.org/Monuments/Sacre.Coeur/. The breathtaking white church of the Sacred Heart alone is a magnificent sight, and coupled with the stunning view over Paris, Montmartre is the highest point of in the city, there can be few settings in the world to equal this. It's a beautiful sunny day, and the steps in front of the church are filled with admirers gazing over the city. We join them momentarily. Miryam and Rocio enter the church. Cecilia, Bryan and I are content to just to bask in the sun and take in the view.
But time presses on, and we stroll the quaint cobblestone streets of this charming neighbourhood
)1. Sacre Coeur. See us at the top of the steps?
. We espy an appealing little restaurant called La Maison Rose, a tiny two-floor pink building crammed into a miniscule corner lot. We take light refreshments there, and then catch the Montmartrobus to Place des Abbesses. We are feeling a bit peckish, and decide it would be better to have lunch rather than dinner today. We select a welcome looking sidewalk café, Le Saint Jean and with salads, sandwiches, dessert, wine and very friendly service, our bill is a paltry €55.00 for our party of five. A bargain and charmant to boot! Finally a true French experience.I now need some more cash, so I now try my ATM card at a branch of the venerable Credit Lyonnaise. Again, my trusty Washington Mutual ATM card produces the Euros I request, without even a whimper.
Our next stop is for shopping on Les Grandes Boulevards. We take the métro at Abbesses, which has one of Paris' last true Art Nouveau entrances designed by Hector Guimard between 1898-1904. http://lartnouveau.ifrance.com/lartnouveau/artistes/guimard/metro_abbesses.htm. There are no escalators here and we are obliged to descend to the underground platform by way of a long circular stairway. The entire wall all the way down is decorated by local artists, sadly almost covered in graffiti. We alight at Haussmann St-Lazare and proceed to Au Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, Paris' great department stores
02. Place du Tertre
. The afternoon of shopping gratifies the ladies. Bryan and I, meanwhile, start our odyssey in search of the perfect European sneaker, something he could wear in Miami and know that no one else had anything remotely similar. He loved the Puma line, but after an extensive search of Au Printemps, Galleries Lafayette and other nearby sports shops, we were amazed to find that not one had a size 46 (12 in the USA).
We metro back to the hotel to pick up our flock of wheeled suitcases, then continue on to Gare d'Austerlitz to commence the overnight rail journey to the South of France. http://www.paris.org/Gares/Austerlitz/.
We are to pick up our tickets at the automatic ticket machine in the main concourse. We have been given a PIN number, and instructed to swipe our credit card through the machine as an ID. All is well with the PIN number, but the darn machine won't accept our credit card. We have visions of being stuck in Austerlitz for eternity knowing that our tickets are in the darn machine just waiting to be printed. Fortunately next to the automatic machines is the regular ticket counter. We approach the window and start explaining that we are having trouble getting our tickets from the ATM. Before we are finished explaining, the vendor signals us to give him the PIN and the credit card, and ... voila...five perfect tickets shoot out of his apparatus. He explains that they have been having trouble with the automatic machines. Vive La France! We have still yet to find an unpleasant Parisian!
