The European Extravaganza!

Paris: Day 3

Our last full day in Paris was our "Amélie Day"... or at least the morning was! We took the metro to Anvers, where we then walked up the steps to the Sacré Coeur Cathedral. On the way, we had to fend off numerous vendors, that we dubbed 'string sellers'. They ask you to put out your hand and hold up threads, saying they want to give you a good luck charm. We don't know about you, but we don't give our hands to strange men. Again I was mistaken for Mexican! Curse my non-translucent skin and vaguely "ethnic" looks! The view from the top was quite nice (although it was rather foggy) and the cathedral was, as it always has been, very impressive. We steered clear of the catacombes, however, having learned our lesson in Vienna!

Now nicely ensconced in Montmartre, we made our way through the winding streets looking at the vintage French ads. I was determined to find ads for Absinth to complement the spoon I had picked up in Prague, but while we could find prints for chocolate and perrier, the absinth ones were strangely absent. Was it because all the tourists had bought them, or are they banned? No bother, we eventually hit the jackpot, and found a place where they had not 1 ad, but 4 different ones! Magnifique! I snatched those up, and we also go some ads for the Moulin Rouge (hee! Paris qui danse!), the Paris Casino, and a potentially dirty French paper called "Frou Frou" with a vaguely sinister smoking woman in a can-can skirt on it (it was very chic). We then made our way down the mountain (sacre bleu! cobblestone again!) and found the real life Moulin Rouge to snap some photos. Being that it was broad daylight, there was no topless can-can for us.

We then hitched a ride on the metro to the Place de la Concorde, where we had hoped to stroll along the Champs Elysées. Unfortunately, as Bastille Day is upcoming, much of the city is blocked off and so we had to wander for quite some time through the gardens instead. We did eventually make our way to the main strip, and even browsed in some of the stores... we are of course talking about Zara's and The Gap (calm yourself, Taryn), as the haute coutour shops are now surrounded by these far more commercial establishments. They even have this nasty French burger chain called Quick Burger there, and 2 McDonalds! You know that if the stores are letting us in, they can't be that upscale!

After a few pictures in front of the Arc de Triomphe, we began to look for a grocery store. Although that quest was not successful, we did manage to get ourselves to the Eiffel Tower where the line to go up was crazy long. No bother to us since we wanted to go up at sunset as my Book of Lies recommended that as a "moment". We asked the info booth where the nearest grocery store was, and made our way there to pick up the fixings for a pic-nic (as they like to call it here in Europe). We got a real baguette, some cheese again, tomatoes, baby radishes, and instead of paté, something called "rillette" which I knew was made of pork and vaguely recalled eating it the last time I was in France... funny how I remembered that little red container 7 years later! Thankfully my memory was accurate, because the rillette was incredibly yummy and certainly not anything you could ever get in Canada (we don't think you can buy something with that high a fat content in North America... take that United States and your pork rinds!).

We ignored the Book of Lies and made our own moment by pic-nicking right in front of the Eiffel Tower in the Champs de Mars. It was our best meal yet, and the most incredible experience. We decided not to go up the tower since what is the Paris skyline if you can't see the Eiffel Tower? Instead, we lounged about on the grass and took 'arty' photos of us in front of the tower and enjoyed these 2 troubadors who played such hits as Wonderwall and George Micheal's "Faith". It was great!

Laura picked herself up her coveted eiffel tower in a snow globe, and we made our way back to the hotel. It was so nice out that we walked for quite a while talking about 80s movies and tv shows (we seem to have had identical childhoods), before we realized we had a metro ticket burning its way out of our pockets and we didn't really want to walk all the way home. Deciding to make the most of our private bathroom, we did a whole lot of washing in the sink, hung it up to dry, and got ready to depart Paris the next day.

posted by Steph @ 11:24 am