Frazzling France

In the middle of November, we set off for London, where we were planning to get on board the Eurostar train to take us, for the first time ever, to "the Continent". We arrived at St Pancras Station just three days after the new fast train connection had opened.

Whilst waiting to board the train, we learned that public transport workers in Paris were on strike!! Not sure what we were walking into, we hopped on the Eurostar train and set off.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later, we were in Paris at the Gare du Nord.

After John's first attempt to order food in French (less said the better!), we joined the taxi queue in order to travel to our hotel. The metro lines were working, at reduced capacity, but we weren't confident that we could actually get on the train when it came. An hour later, we hopped into a taxi...and had our first view of the infamous Paris traffic:

as well as our first sights of authentic French architecture:

We arrived at L'Hotel Princesse Isabelle, near La Défense in a suburb called Puteaux, in a north-western direction from the city centre. It had a certain charm:

We were well-served by being directed to dinner at Chez Patrick, a local French restaurant run by a Frenchman married to a Scots woman--and thus, well able to help us order in English! (Yes, it was cheating.) The food was très bon. We then retired to a diet of wall-to-wall French-language television (withn one show that we recognised--in Italian), and the ubiquitous CNN (the European version).

The next day we walked to the Metro station and were able to catch a train without difficulty. Again, it has to be admitted that buying a ticket was made simple by the fact that the Metro was not charging people to ride, because of the reduced services; so John's attempt to ask for "un billet au cité" was met with a gruff wave, pointing through the ticket barrier!

We got off at Charles de Gaulle station, next to the Arc de Triomphe, a hugely impressive monument at the head of the Champs Elysée.

And here, just to prove that we were actually there:

After this we walked for a time along the Champs Elysée:

We had set out thinking that a weekend in Paris would be good. At a dinner here at Wesley House just before we left, one of the student's wives told Elizabeth that he took her to Paris for a surprise visit one weekend and proposed to her under the Eiffel Tower.

So we thought we were in for a 'romantic' weekend. But it was freezing cold (maximum 6 degrees in the middle of the day) and there were huge crowds; the queues under the Tower filled almost the whole base area.

As we determined that we were not, in fact, going to queue in the hope of going up the Tower, we were hassled by beggars for money, we bought some atrocious "coffee" (at least, that is what they called it), and watched in wonderment at the threesomes of armed soldiers patrolling the area. Quite relaxing (not).

But we were there....

(Notice the trinkets imitating the Tower behind Elizabeth in the above photo. We must have encountered about sixty men all told, each trying to sell these!)

We felt utterly frazzled by these experiences, but we had bought a day ticket on one of the tourist buses that drove around the city, so we continued for the rest of the day and did manage to see some of the sights of Paris from the outside--and some on the inside. It was warm inside the bus (but guess who decided we should sit outside on the uncovered top, exposed to the wind blowing off the river, for one leg of the journey???)

We saw the Seine River from various angles:

the Musée du Louvre:

It was huge! But it served decent coffee inside:

and the Cathédrale de Nôtre Dame, a massive building filled with crowds of people (and notices warning of the pickpockets):

As the daylight dimmed, we drove past the part of the city where The Ritz hotel is (there were various references on the bus commentary to a certain princess at this site):

past a spectacular lighting display at the Paris Opéra:

and back to the Champs Elysée at night, which was much more crowded than earlier in the day:

We visited the spectacular shopping malls and bought a few mementos:

and were reminded of a certain offspring of Elizabeth:

before eating dinner (in a French-speaking Italian restaurant), and returning to our hotel. Quite a memorable day!!

The next day would see us travel north into Belgium...the subject for the next post.