Our flight left at 6pm. We were on a 747. Mercifully, John had an aisle seat so he could stretch out a bit. The flight to London was actually only 5 hours, which just seems amazing. I think it takes longer to get from one coast to the other. At any rate, we had 5 hours to somehow adjust ourselves to the time change. We did snooze a little bit, but it’s difficult to get good sleep on a plane. We changed planes in London to a little commuter plane (not tooo little—they didn’t, for example, ask us how much we weigh) for the 45-minute flight to Paris.
Upon landing in Paris, we went through customs (they didn’t stamp our passports!), picked up our baggage (yay--our baggage made it!), and went to look for the Roissy buses that take you from the airport to the Opera Garnier which is well inside Paris. That was a little bit of a challenge because, as it turned out, the bus stop was outside another building that was fortunately right next to us. The bus was 7.5 euros, but it was worth it. After about 45 minutes, we were at the Opera Garnier (after having passed what we later found out was the stadium Paris built when it hosted the soccer World Cup—and we thought the new addition to Soldier Field looked like a spaceship!). It took a bit of doing to figure out where the metro stop was in that area (we had to ask some policemen) which turned out to be in the middle of the intersection. We bought two carnet (books of 10 tickets) at an automatic ticket booth, and hopped the metro line 8 toward Balard. Our stop (Ecole Militaire) was only about 15 minutes away. Fortunately, there were escalators there (getting very tired of hauling my suitcase up and down stairs) and we left the metro stop to find our hotel not 50 feet from the stop. Our room was ready and we took the elevator to the 7th floor (the elevator is about 3 feet wide and 1 foot deep—I swear to you there is exactly enough room for John and I to stand side by side and that’s it!).
Our room is tres petite. There is a double bed, and three feet of floor space on the left and right sides of the bed and about a foot and a half of space at the foot of the bed. We have a tiny desk and a minifridge—just big enough to keep our water bottles cold (and maybe for a bottle of wine). We do have our own bathroom with a shower, and a phone and a tv (I suppose we could exercise our French by watching French tv). But, the best thing, by far, is the view from our window.
WE HAVE A VIEW OF THE EIFFEL TOWER!!!!
Okay, so the smokestack right next to it is slightly less than attractive, but we still have a view of the Eiffel Tower! How cool is that?!?!?!? Thank you, Rick Steves! We got the name of the hotel out of the Rick Steves Paris guide and he suggested requesting a courtyard room if you wanted a quieter room, which we did. And lo and behold, we get to see La Tour Eiffel. I can safely and unequivocally say that this is much, much better than the accommodations I had during my last stay in Paris (a godawful hostel in the Bastille district). So, if you are coming to Paris, and don’t mind fairly Spartan accommodations, in a clean, inexpensive (about $84 per night) hotel, go to Hotel Royal Phare and request room 74.
We were pretty wiped after our journey, so we each took a shower and then a nap. When we woke up (about 2pm local time), we were a little hungry, so we thought we’d go see what the neighborhood had to offer. There is a small street nearby called Rue Cler that has an open-air fruit market, and several cafes and brasseries (where you can get sandwiches). So we each picked up a sandwich and we wandered around Rue Cler and subsequent streets until we ended up at Invalides, which is a military museum. I was much too tired to go to a museum, and really feeling like another nap, so John and I went back to our rooms and I napped while John read our travel guides (we also have a AAA guide from Joan and Jerry which has great information in it). At about 5 pm, we went out again, this time to see our friend the Eiffel Tower up close and personal. We stood in line for about 30 minutes to get tickets and ride the elevator up to the second level (we didn’t feel the need to go up to the top) where the view was pretty spectacular. We could see Notre Dame and Sacre-Coeur from there (although our camera couldn’t focus on Notre Dame, so we didn’t get a picture of that one). We had someone take our picture up on the second level (actually, we had several someones because the picture kept not coming out right—I love our digital camera).
We took the stairs down to the first level (not to be confused with the ground floor) and got to see the inner guts of the tower, which was pretty cool. The elevators are as old as the tower and run on these giant pulleys. On the first level, the view was still pretty cool and we went around the tower looking at these placards that point out the various sites around Paris (kind of like up on the observation deck in the Pru in Boston), although, some of the sites you had to squint to see and some of them were behind taller buildings, so you couldn’t actually see them. But, it still gave you an idea of where everything was in relation to where we were. Then, we headed back down to the ground (on the elevator—we had enough of going down stairs) and, since the tower was lit now, sat down and took a few pix of the tower, fiddling with the settings of the camera until we got one that really looked like what we were seeing.
At that point, it was 9 pm local time, and we were getting hungry, so we went to La Trevasse 7e (a nearby restaurant; Caroll, I swear this is the exact same restaurant we ate at when were here, only the crazy waiter wasn’t there) where I had a huge pot full of mussels in white wine sauce (there was no seafood fork and the mussels were small, so, remembering something Matt told me once, I used the shell of one mussel to pull the other mussels out of their shells—it worked very well) and John had a steak he thought was a little too gristly. He also ordered it medium-well, which translates into medium here in France—I’m not sure what well-done would look like. I ordered a wine that said it was rose, but it was much darker than an American blush wine so I’m not sure exactly what it was, but it was good.
Feeling full, we decided to call it a night. We went back to our room to stare at the Tower some more (at night, there are also search lights coming off the tower which were neat to watch), identified the big dipper and the north star in the sky, then, since it was 11pm, we went to bed. Not wanting to waste any moment I could be looking at the Tower, I put my pillow at the foot of the bed so I could watch it while I fell asleep.
Au revoir for now!
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