Day Nine: Finishing up

So after the lame bistro we spent the evening preparing to leave. Packing, drinking our last bottle of wine, finishing up the good cheese, importing photos from the various cameras and phones, writing blog entries... All the important stuff.

As a reward for being ready to leave, we spent one last session at Les Editeurs. Just a half bottle of wine (we did have to get up five hours earlier than usual) and some nice snacky food. Carpaccio, French toast (er, Pain Perdu as it seems you aren't allowed to call it French toast in France). We exchanged notes with a couple from New York (I beg to differ with you, honey... lol) and watched gypsies steal money off people's tables. Eventually though, we had to go home and sleep... and wait for the 5am wakeup call that would be coming in a few hours.



On the way home, we took a picture of the statue who we assumed was Antoine the whole week (based on the street name) but actually ended up being Vulpian. Who?

And we had to interrupt a lovely couple to do it. Oops.

Day Nine: Not all bistros are created equal

Last night in Paris. The plan was a little bread and cheese and drink a bottle of wine. Except... No bread places and no cheese places were open, since it was Sunday. Of course. Sunday is a day of abstinence for French people or something. Okay, so we will go back and hit one of the nice bistros we ate at over the week. It was not that far and we got to walk by a nice theatre we had made the acquaintance of. We turned the corner and... It's dark. Crap. Now what? We had seen what looked like a cute little local bistro on the way here, we decided to just eat there. Au Petit Suisse... Seemed like a good name, not scary like the Madness Bar we kept walking by. Drinks were fine (who really can screw up opening bottles of wine?) food was less than impressive. The most impressive part of the meal was reheated in a microwave. Sigh. Not our best bistro experience and probably in the bottom three.

Day Nine: Louvre (really!)

Louvre. The international museum of mystery. Or something like that. The first public museum in Europe. It has been mentioned a number of times this week, but always sacrificed to other goals as it is large and a pain in the ass to navigate.

But, today, we are en route to a meeting with destiny. Perhaps Michigan doesn't have a defense, but we have Museum Passes and can walk right in the back door at the Louvre bypassing all those Pyramid lines (much like the Michigan defense wishes it could, against any Division I school and a number of smaller schools).

We are armed with the Rick Steeves Louvre guide, hoping to hit the highlights and still have time to get some other things accomplished today. Headphones, iPad, Louvre... All ready to start, so here we go!

Enter the first wing, follow the directions... Bzzzt! Exhibit moved! Somewhere else with a not very helpful map of where! It became clear that people don't whine much when their objective is already being achieved. We wandered for much longer than we should have before jumping over the pre-Classical Greek statues. Then finding Venus de Milo was a bit of a chore, using the Rick Steeves directions and the Louvre map. Once we were in the right wing, though, and following the signs, it was a bit better. And when we got to Venus, we got back on the "highlights" tour with no problem.





Per tour instructions, we took careful note of Venus' butt, but no picture of that, best to leave some things to be seen for yourself.

From Venus, we trekked to Winged Victory, then through a number of paintings, including the Mona Lisa. Who knew she was so young!





Finally, after a little snack, we reached the end of the tour. Tired but triumphant we exited the Louvre. We were glad that was done!

Day Nine: Sunday is when things are closed

Last Sunday, when we arrived, we were too glassy eyed to notice that everything really was closed, not just the museums. So this morning, Bonnie went out to shop, and came back empty handed. Shops are mostly closed, just food establishments are open. It must be the drinking that goes on Saturday night, as everyone we knew drank like fishes!

Breakfast was at Le Danton again. We love this place, the wait staff actually pays attention and our favorite waiter sings little French tunes as he works. He looks much like the annoying French waiter from Allard, but has a much shorter stick up his butt.

Set out (unbelievably I know) for the Louvre... After a close call with more shopping, we are on the Metro wending our way to the Royal Palais.

Day Eight: Dinner alá Sardines

While discovering a new university earlier in the day, we also discovered what looked like a great place close by to have dinner, Au Pére Louis. We figured we would stroll in around 8pm and have a nice leisurely dinner.

Wrong. We walked in at 8pm, the place was packed with no discernible organized seating activity. After walking toward some empty tables, large vicious dogs descended upon us and blocked our way. Not only that but this 80 pound (metric measures are failing at the moment) girl jumped into our path and instructed us to back away from the tables. "They are all reserved" I hear. Oh, okay. She says there is the table of pain free if you would like that (but in French so I have no idea what she is saying). She smiles while she says this, so like stupid tourists we smile too and follow her into the pit.

Our table is under the stairs in the aisleway. Bonnie takes the Harry Potter seat under the stairs and I take the chair in the aisle. Great. Oh, and there are no printed menus they admit to (until it is an ordering fiasco and magic English menus appear). The draw of this place is that they have cassoulet, recommended, known for it. I have been waiting for a decent cassoulet since Kerrytown Bistro closed (and that was fake cassoulet anyways). So I get the cassoulet, Bonnie orders duck (not wild duck, chasing them down costs much much more). We order a bottle of wine, which comes from a cellar that might have been used to film any number of horror movies. It only had a half door for gods sake!

After all that, and being whacked by passersby every few minutes, the cassoulet is amazing! Everything I imagined authentic cassoulet would be, including the pool of grease you see to begin with but then magically is gone after you eat the whole thing. For dessert, Bonnie had their profiteroles, which got rave reviews, even though the waitress brought two instead of the one that was ordered. Somehow after tasting the first one there was no complaining about the second one!

We roll home to the hotel, fat and happy.

Day Eight: La Sorbonne

We went uphill from the hotel for the first time since the first jetlagged day and turned left. Holy cow! Nice building with a dome! Domes usually translate to interesting places and interesting places usually have food spots so we walked the couple blocks to see what we might see.



The first thing we discover is that rue Saint Michel is a happening place and there is a square right across the street from where we are. So like the square lemmings we are (and noticing there are a lot of people sitting outside in bistros eating and sucking down espresso) we go check it out. A pizza bistro, yawn, something that looks a little nicer, fine. Perhaps we can get some wine and food and coffee and review the zillion photos from Chartres.

Somehow it turns out the place we sit in is connected to the pizza place and somehow we end up with pizza. I didn't do it! At least we got some decent wine and much better un café than we got earlier in the day.

While sitting there and looking at where we were, I noticed we were ummm right next to the Sorbonne! That big dome... University of Paris IV... The Cartes School... I knew Hallmark had a lot of things going on but this is way bigger than I imagined.









This last guy seems to be giving the thumbs up to incoming students. How friendly of them!

So after being duly impressed we went back to the hotel and rested from our adventures (translation: wrote blog entries). What to do for dinner?

Day Eight: Chartres (still)

Morning eventually came and we were due down at breakfast at 10am. While getting ready, we watched the townspeople make their way to the market, shopping carts hauling back piles of baguettes and other staples like oysters and rabbits. Breakfast was surprisingly good for free, though we got stuck with "American" coffee, blech, horrible. A variety of cheeses and breads and fruit and orange juice and yucky coffee.

After confirming our breakfast really was included with the room and that the nice lady who was tending the store was not going to chase us down as we were going by the cathedral, we set out to see the market. The market had been recommended by our professor friend the night we ate at Polidor (as well as the castle down by the river in Chartres, but that was too much to ask with no makeup, you know). To find the market again, we could have invoked the power of Google Maps (the iPad had worked perfectly on 3G after the nice French Orange girl let us prepay so that the data plan auto-renewed) but we elected to use the stream of people with empty market baskets as a hint of the general direction to go. Unbelievably we found the place just by following customers (I'm sure there is a marketing or business development lesson in there somewhere).

Wow. If you thought the Ann Arbor Farmers Market was interesting, it is nothing compared to a good French Saturday morning market. Old and young hawkers of fruits, vegetables, fowl and fish, quite a show with the origin of each item clearly marked.











After wandering the market and admiring all the items (especially the pile of bunnies), we needed caffeine support. Of course there was a bistro right there willing to sell us un café in Lavazza cups with Lavazza water glasses and Lavazza sucre even. Not the best but by far the most inexpensive espresso since we got to Paris. After being fortified, we shopped a bit and then made our way back to the train station.

So a bit about trains in France and Europe too I imagine. We bought tickets to Chartres and back that were good until December 28. We did not have any particular day we had to travel. On the way out of Paris, we just took our tickets and got on the train. At that point we did not even realize the tickets were not for travel that day. While we were sitting in the Chartres train station we noticed these brightly colored things that seemed to be saying "compost your tickets here!". How ecologically correct, I thought, making sure tickets got disposed of properly. After all, there were recycling points all over the city!



Then we noticed a few people stuck their tickets in but pulled them back out again (except for one girl who seemed to have her ticket get stuck, go figure). So we started trying to translate what it said on the pillar. Google Translate fail. We puzzled over this until we noticed that the tickets themselves had a mention of this composting operation right across the top of the ticket. Finally, curiosity got the better of me and I stuck my ticket in the slot. No sirens, no whirring of a paper shredder, it just printed the date on the ticket. Yippee. How exciting was that? It didn't even know which train I was getting on, so it did not do any kind of capacity control (and WOW the train back to Paris was stuffed to the gills with people, most of whom did not follow the composting procedure I would wager).

But, composted or not, back to Paris we went.





We discover that somewhere in the alcoholic haze Bonnie's rail pass has vaporized (who knew they dissolved in alcohol vapor!) so the first order of business on arriving back in Montparnasse is buying a one trip Metro ticket. Luckily, we had no idea what to buy or how much it cost or that Saturday was a very busy day on the Metro, so purchasing this ticket took forever. However, we are now experts and will be adding this information to our forthcoming book.

Finally we arrive back at our hotel, our stuff still in our room and no investigations were launched as to the cause of our disappearance. We were hungry though and set off in one of the directions we had not explored yet.

We discovered that one block away (more or less) was the Sorbonne!

Day Seven: Change in Plan

The rolling display of pictures from inside the hotel was very convincing. Tired from a whole day of pilgrimaging and with one carafe of wine down, it seemed easier to just check into the cute hotel in Chartres than make our way all the back to Paris. Luckily, October is not high tourist season in Chartres and there were rooms available. Breakfast was included and we got a recommendation from the guy who checked us in for a nice restaurant that was not too far a walk.



Not having to go back to Paris left us with a reason to celebrate and a little time before we needed to show up for dinner. Another 50cl of wine seemed the correct way to relax and enjoy our newfound home in Chartres.



We set off down the hill from our hotel and the cathedral into the lower town to find our dinner spot. Les Feuillintines was the recommendation, a good and not overly expensive eating experience. The chef was a friend of the guy at the hotel, who recommended us to go elsewhere than eat at the hotel. Compared with our dining outings in Paris, this was pretty cheap and extremely good. I had wild duck and Bonnie had ummm a lot of wine. She thinks she had some beef thing. Or veal. Something like that. We had a glass of champagne to celebrate finally getting to Chartres and then a nice grand cru Burgundy to go with dinner. After dessert and un café we wandered back up the hill to Le Parvis.







Not having turned on the TV once while in Paris, I was not sure what you might find late night in a area like Chartres. The highlight seemed to be Earl and some soft core porn, that was it. So much for watching TV before falling asleep.

Day Seven: Chartres (finally!)

Friday dawned bright and sunny, or so I heard. By the time we were up, a bit earlier than usual, around 10:30am local time, the day looked great and plans to spend it indoors at the Louvre were scrapped (again). Instead, we decided to hop on a train and travel across the French countryside to the village of Chartres. Now, it might have been a village at one point, but Chartres is a big damn town now. Getting off the train and exiting the station, it was not as simple as looking up and obviously seeing the cathedral. Google maps has been invaluable on this trip to find things and once again we got walking directions to our destination. The cathedral was only a few minutes away, but it was obscured by a number of crappy buildings in front of the station.



Pictures do not convey a fraction of the experience of walking into the cathedral and seeing the massive transepts, stained glass windows and choir. When the organ starts to play, it is truly an amazing experience. We wandered around, through the choir, the various side chapels, and the main altar. There is a major renovation effort underway, as the structure, both inside and out, has blackened over the 800 years or so it has been standing. The sections already restored look incredible next to the dark sooty portions.





No flash photography in the cathedral and most of it is very dark, which makes for interesting photo challenges. That did not stop us from taking a ton of pictures that will need to be processed to see which might be decent.

One of the areas that has minimal light is the labyrinth. Quite famous, this twisted route in a 40 foot circular area is supposed to recreate a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for those who could not afford to do it. I walked the path, interesting because others who were doing it would get lost or confused as to which line they were on or perhaps would treat it as a real pilgrimage and walk slowly so it would take the same amount of time as walking to Jerusalem. This last group of people was not very popular and a large line would queue up behind them, grumbling about having a train to catch.



There are only so many hours you can spend inside a darkened cathedral and eventually we came outside. The "old" section of Chartres is just as you'd envision an old French village, twisty winding streets, most narrow enough that cars have difficulty getting through (and they have gates that restrict access). We found a place with friendly people who sold us ham and cheese croissants and warmed them and we walked to have lunch in the nearest square.







After lunch, we poked around the outside of the cathedral compound. The cathedral sits up on a hill and has a nice view of the town that has grown up around it since medieval times.







In a city that grew up catering to travelers, there is an amazing amount of... Shopping! So we window shopped quite a bit as well, but were required to actually go into one shop...





We bought a bear, of course. Ah, well, another cute bear for the collection. :)

By this time it had turned colder and we needed to warm up. We decided (after a long involved inspection of every bistro in our section of town, or so we thought) to have a bit of wine at Le Parvis. It was nice, inexpensive, and right across from the cathedral. Perfect to warm up in and enjoy our purchase.

Day Six: Dinner: Restaurant Polidor

One of the restaurants dismissed during the anniversary dinner research was one recommended by Frommers but described as more of a classic drinking house of days gone by. It prides itself on not accepting credit cards since it opened in 1845. It is a favorite haunt of French professors due to the lower prices, or perhaps due to the minimal sanitation facilities (the "bathroom" is a hole in the floor).



Restaurant Polidor has been operating since 1845 and, although not pictured here, it appears some of the original staff are still waiting tables. Much like the famous Van Wert, Ohio, venue (perhaps they are sister restaurants?) Polidor is primarily staffed by lovely old ladies of few words.

Seating is bench style using the "pack 'em in" seating methodology. This means you know precisely what your neighbor has for dinner and what they plan on doing afterward. One of our dinner companions was a professor at a French preparatory school, with side consulting gigs with every type of engineering company in france I could think of. He designed brake systems for Renault, waste disposal systems for nuclear reactors and guidance systems for the French air force (I only made one of those up). He was a very interesting guy who almost did not talk to us because we ordered the Boeuf Bourguignon and he was looking for Americans to talk to (Americans never order beef, didn't you know). We learned all about the French educational system and about cross-Atlantic relationships (his girlfriend works in Boston). He also heartily recommends Legal Seafood, if you get to Boston. :)

So it was a tired crew who walked the eight meters back to our hotel from dinner, thinking of doing the Louvre on Friday. I see a theme developing here...

Day Six: Musée d'Orsay

Monet! Manet! Renoir! What is not to like about Musée d'Orsay? Not to mention Modigliani!

The walk to Orsay was nice, not too busy, though the museum is under serious construction, so entering is a little bit confusing. The Seine was busy as usual though.





Entering the museum using the Paris Museum Pass was a breeze again, skip the line and walk right in. The Orsay has a strict no photography policy (copyright issues?) so of course the first thing we did was take a photo!



Nothing exciting here, we saw the usual Van Gogh, Monet, Sissley, and other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists. The crowds were not horrific and we went through every exhibition in just a few hours. It was interesting seeing groups of little children gathered with drawing paper and colored pencils around famous paintings and doing their own interpretation. I did not observe any obvious successors to Van Gogh and these kids all had all their ears.

We turned in our audioguides and headed home on the Metro, pondering dinner.

Day Six: Louvre (not)

The plan was Louvre. A whole day (such as we have had, given working on tourist time) devoted to wandering around the Louvre. With our newfound Metro savvy, we took the Metro down this time, saving the long walk and dropping us right at the more or less secret Richelieu entrance to the Louvre, we walked right in with no line! We walked right into the Pyramid and set out to put together a plan for seeing things. It seemed we needed some help with the plan, so a bottle of wine seemed appropriate and luckily the Louvre people provide a nice cafe to think and ponder the world in. A couple appetizers and a bottle of wine and we were set to build our plan.





After most of a bottle of wine, we thought we had a plan. It mostly entailed getting a plan from the Louvre information. Unfortunately, they do not give out plans, either free or for pay unless there is a guide involved (at least that we could find).





So... We took a few pictures and walked over to Musée d'Orsay. To be continued...