Exploring Paris - in one day

These last three posts are rather belated. Since we returned home on Wednesday November 20, life has been rather hectic. However there are a few loose ends that I would like to tie up.

We only had one full day to explore Paris - Monday November 19th. So we obviously had to select what we wanted to do. Nevertheless, I am reasonably happy will what we did manage to see.

We were a bit slow getting started but eventually made our way to the Château Rouge metro station. En route, we went past a playground - not sure how many places in that neighbourhood would have had their own outdoor space as most seem to be apartments.

I had always envisaged climbing the Eiffel Tower if ever in Paris. However, at the suggestion of our host Nicolas, we decided to go to the Montparnasse Tower instead. After a short detour via a C&A store, we paid our money and got the lift to the 56th floor. The top floors and the terrace are only accessible by stairs. It wasn't until we got out of the lift, that we realised how poor the visibility was - our sole day in Paris was marred by low cloud/fog! We went around to all the display boards and tried to see the landmarks of Paris. Here are a couple of examples of how little we could see.

Jardins du Luxembourg (with Notre-Dame de Paris in background)

Rue de Rennes

Invalides

Eiffel Tower

We decided that it wasn't worth venturing up the stairs for more disappointing views!

Nicolas had also suggested catching the metro to Trocadéro as there was a good view of the Eiffel Tower from there. So we did that next.

We then walked to the base of the Eiffel Tower and bought our tickets to go on a Bateau Parisiens River Seine cruise. The boat trip was quite informative as it came with a commentary, but as we sat inside it was not great for photos. We originally thought of joining on a hop on hop off boat, but the Bateau Parisiens was the only one running as the river was very high (so we didn't get to see Notre Dame from the water).

Rather liked this view though:-

After our boat trip we thought that we still had things to see...so we caught the metro to Charles de Gaulle Étoile and emerged to view the Arc de Triomphe.

We then set off to walk the nearly four kilometres to the Louvre.

It was very exciting to be walking down the Champs-Élysées...

At about 5:30pm I decided that it was time for dinner - our last meal in Europe. A number of places we saw had been way too expensive and I wasn't prepared to patronise a well-known fast food outlet. However we found somewhere that fitted in our budget and it turned out the food was actually quite good!

Although it was only just past the middle of November, we walked past heaps of Christmas stalls as there was an extremely large Christmas market going on. Also, even though it was a Monday night there were numerous people out and about. We walked and walked, past the Place de la Concorde, past the Jardin des Tuillerie (which was just shutting), and eventually arrived at the Louvre.

We had already decided that we didn't have the time, or necessarily the inclination, to visit any galleries in Paris, or anywhere else for that matter. I love visiting art galleries, but it isn't Anna's favourite occupation and although we occasionally go our own ways, we tend to do 'mutually agreeable activities'! I had gone to Canberra in March 2010 specifically to see the Masterpieces from Paris exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. That exhibition featured 112 of some of the best-known works of modern art from the Musée d’Orsay, but this certainly wouldn't have been Anna's idea of a good way to spend one's (limited) time and money.

I have often heard about long queues for entrance to various attractions. One advantage of travelling in the 'low season' is that queues are usually quite short or even non-existent. On the other hand, not everything is open and the weather is sometimes less than perfect. I just have to think “view from Montparnasse Tower”!

By this stage I realised that I was very tired - it was 7:40 when I took the photo outside the Louvre. We were a bit confused about how to get back to the apartment, but realised that there was almost certainly a metro station close by. There was - the aptly named Palais Royal Musée du Louvre. We made our way from there to Barbès Rochechouart with only one change at Gare de l'Est. From there it was just a short walk to the apartment.

We almost had more time in Paris than planned as we only just made it to the airport on time the next morning. Although I completely unpacked at every place we stopped and successfully repacked, the thought of packing everything for our trip home was rather daunting. As I decided to finish my packing in the morning, I should have got up earlier as we were later leaving the apartment than we intended (but only by about 15 minutes). We walked to Gare du Nord rather than face the escalators at the metro with our luggage in tow. When we got to the station we had trouble getting a ticket - the first machine wouldn't take cards and the others had long queues (something we should have bought the day before I guess). Fortunately the queues at the ticket office were shorter. When we eventually had tickets we made our way to the appropriate platform, but there was no way we could get on the first train. We moved down the platform away from the entrance. However unlike most places we had been where trains are every few minutes we had to wait nine minutes, which actually become thirteen minutes, for the next train. We managed to get on, but sardines come to mind. Actually many people on the train weren't going to Charles de Gaulle but to Parc des Expositions, the stop before the airport. Fortunately we were therefore able to easily alight when we got to the airport. Although we had avoided the metro stations earlier because of escalators, we had to use escalators to access the platform for the inter-terminal shuttle. As I was racing along behind Anna, I made a mental note to never again put myself though such stress. However we got our luggage dropped off and got through security with very little time to spare. No time for breakfast and last minute shopping like at Luton. It was a great relief to find our seats and sit down. The plane wasn't full and Anna and I had chosen a window and an aisle seat with a spare seat in between. As we suspected would be the case, no-one ended up sitting in between us so we had room to move. Had a good flight to Singapore. The plane from Singapore wasn't full either so we didn't even sit together but each had a window seat with a spare seat next to us. (It was a 2 4 2 layout, not 3 4 3 as on the first plane. We had a great holiday, but it was wonderful to get home.