We made a trip into Paris today and although there were a couple minor problems, it was great to be back in our favorite city.
Here’s a reason I love this city:
Ya know, there just aren’t many views like that in the world. On the left, that’s the back of Notre Dame, and on the right a block of buildings. All of Ile de la Cité had buildings like that before Haussman, in his effort to “modernize” Paris, tore them down. Now, about a tenth of the island has the old buildings. Ile de la Cité once had 14 churches besides Notre Dame; now it has only Notre Dame and Sainte. Chapelle.
The first…er…difficulty was that when we got to Gare de Lyon, we went to the stop for the most direct metro (subway) into the heart of Paris. We got on a completely stuffed metro car, waited, waited, waited and then the doors closed, and we waited some more. And waited even more. It’s hot, it’s completely jammed (Laurie said she could feel people breathing down her neck) and claustrophobia is starting its work. After ten or twelve minutes of that fun the doors opened. We got off and when it became clear that the No. 1 Metro line was not working too well, I plotted an alternative route. Because Gare de Lyon is a big entry point into Paris, four Metro lines converge there, and a person should be able to transfer from one line to another without needing a ticket. So we followed the signs to the No 14 Metro, got to a place that had a turnstile to go out, and our tickets would not get us out. Stuck in the Metro! Shades of Charlie on the MTA.
Finally we just followed another person out the turnstile (I might point out that we were not the only people doing that), went to the No. 14 line and, of course, our tickets would not get us through the turnstiles to that line, either. So we bought some metro tickets, got in the No. 14 and, 45 minutes after we arrived in Paris, we were at Ile de la Cité – a trip that should have taken ten minutes. Who knows what went wrong?
We took a stroll we’ve taken many times before, just getting back into a Paris frame of mind. We walked down the north side of Ile de la Cité, watched several river boats go by, walked around Ile St. Louis, and had lunch at a Salon de Thé that we’ve eaten at for almost twenty years. We had the same old thing: a smoked salmon and havarti cheese crepe, a chocolate and almond crepe and a half litre of rosé wine. Ah….back in Paris.
Then we walked up to Luxembourg gardens, but the second difficulty was starting to make its effects felt: it was hot – over 80 and pretty humid. I’m okay with that; Laurie is not. So we slowed down to conserve energy. We stopped in at one of our favorite churches here, St. Severin and lucked into an organ recital. Almost no one there, cool, and very peaceful.
St. Severin is one of the oldest churches in Paris, originally built in the eleventh century, and I like it a lot. It’s small, has a unique architecture based on many additions and changes over the years, and has always been a church of students (it’s in the same quartier as the Sorbonne and other Paris universities).
The Luxembourg Gardens were also crammed, and this isn’t a place I expect many tourists to visit. I guess sunny weather after a terrible Winter and Spring caused Spring Fever to infect so many people.
By now, we were dragging, so we decided to head for Gare de Lyon and home. I looked up a bus that would get us to the Gare and down the road we went. Unfortunately, the map I had didn’t show the exact route, so I didn’t realize that the bus going to Gare de Lyon went on a different street that the bus coming from Gare de Lyon. Couldn’t figure out why buses were going one way and not the other. Finally, I gave up, we walked down a block and – voila – there’s a bus station for our bus and, even better, a bus arriving in about five minutes.
We got to the Gare at about 4, knowing that trains that stop in Montigny-sur-Loing leave at 19 minutes past every hour. We saunter in and I see on the Departée board that the next train that stops in Montigny will leave in eight minutes. We run to it, climb aboard, find two seats together and away we go. Turns out that the trains that stop at Montigny leave at 19 minutes after the hour every hour except four and five in the afternoon; those leave at nine minutes after the hour. Phew! Glad we were there a little early.
But the train was slow and late arriving and by the time we got home, we were ready for more than one glass of rosé, which we did indeed have. Laurie put a fish poacher pan that’s in the rental house to a new and excellent use: she soaked her tired feet in it. No fish for us for a while…