Paris walks

We walked a LOT during our week in Paris: miles and miles and miles. Paris public transit is handy, but even that only gets you from near point A to within walking distance of point B. My everyday rural life does not have built in space for walking. I walk a few steps into the garage and then drive everywhere, parking within a few steps of my destination. Outside of my 15-20 miles of running per week, I am rather sedentary. I get my run in and enjoy the luxury of snuggling up on the couch whenever I can afterwards. But running and walking are two very different beasts! Jeff and I got incredibly SORE from walk, walk, walking all day every day for five straight days in Paris. When we got home, I resolved to try and incorporate walking into my routine along with the running.

With those good intentions firmly in hand, after [finally] doing the weekly grocery shopping this morning, I took Amber to the park. It was 33 degrees and iron gray-cloudy outside, so we had the place to ourselves. Instead of sitting and freezing on a metal bench, I walked while Amber played. I called my mom for a chat and walked laps around the playground, zigzagged across the grassy area, basically just wandering aimlessly for 80 minutes while Amber roamed and played. As we were leaving, my watch informed me that I had walked 3.3 miles! Even though aerobically it didn't feel like much, my legs feel worked out now. There is something to this walking thing.

Here is a list of the walks Jeff and I enjoyed in Paris:

1. Valentine's Day jet lag ramble. Time: 3 hours. Distance: unknown. (link to details)
2. Thursday, February 15th: Ile de la Cite and Ile de St. Louis stroll.
   Time: 1 hour. Distance: unknown.
3. Thurs, Feb 15th afternoon: Arch walk--from La Grande Arche to L'arc de Triumph and then on to La Place de la Concorde. Time: 90 minutes. Distance: 4 miles
4. Friday, Feb 16th: from the train station to the temple via the grounds of la Palais de Versailles. Time: 80 minutes. Distance: 3 miles.
5. Saturday, Feb 17th: late afternoon walk around Les Halles and vicinity.
   Time: 100 minutes. Distance: uncertain.
6. Sunday, Feb 18th: afternoon walk around Le Parc de Belleville, Le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, and La Cimetière du Père Lachaise. Time: 2.5 hours. Distance: 5.2 miles
7. Sunday, Feb 18th: evening walk up and around Montmartre.
   Time: 90-ish minutes. Distance: unknown.

A list of the walks we went on is nearly a complete outline of our trip! Here are pictures from three of them:

3. Arch Walk 

On Thursday afternoon we were planning on going to the temple, but we started falling asleep in the metro on the way there, so we decided to go on a walk instead to combat the jet lag. We hopped off the metro at La Defense and walked from La Grande Arche there all the way to L'arc de Triumph, 3 miles away. It rained off and on during our walk and we nearly abandoned ship when the drizzle turned into a downpour. We persevered, however, and the rain eased up on us so we could finish our walk. A straight line can be drawn between the modern Grande Arche and Napoleon's Arc de Triumph. It's pretty nifty to look through one arch and see the other one three miles off in the distance. 

The three mile line from La Grande Arche alllll the way straight ahead to L'arc de Triumph, barely visible at the vanishing point.

Ready to embark on a long walk--anything to stay awake! 

Jeff and I coerced each other into doing embarrassing touristy photo poses holding up the arches. He took the first one.  

The Grande Arche really isn't all that fancy or pretty. It's in the modern business section of Paris, but I'm not sure that's a good excuse. Apparently there are offices inside the arch! Crazy. 

90 minutes later... I felt totally ridiculous posing for this. This arch is in the center of a giant busy traffic circle.

I'm cracking up in most of our selfies from this trip because every time I tried to take a selfie of us, my aim was SO terribly off that Jeff had to take over. The man has incredible spatial reasoning.

It had stopped raining by the time we reached L'arc de Triumph, so we decided to keep on walking that line beyond the arch, down Le Champs-Elysses all the way to La Place de la Concorde, with its 3,000 year old Egyptian obelisk. I guess if your name is King Louis-Phillipe, Egypt gives you giant historic hieroglyphic granite gifts.

Even Seattle has an observation wheel, Paris. 

5. Les Halles and vicinity

On Saturday evening, we emerged from the metro at Les Halles to peek in the Lego store for Jay, enjoying the massive French Lego creations but leaving quickly due to the crowds. It was a gorgeous sunny evening, and people swarmed the shopping area. We wandered around Les Halles a bit, passing St. Eustache cathedral, then heading over to Notre Dame for a peek before wending our way across the river to check out Rue du Dragon, site of Victor Hugo's teenage bachelor pad. Footsore and hungered, we finally emerged from the alleys and found a restaurant for dinner.

Lego Notre Dame. Jeff took a picture of this last year, but I barely remembered it for some reason. 

Hundreds of thousands of Legos.

Les Halles underground mall, with St. Eustache cathedral on the right. 

St. Eustache, with her buttresses flying every which way and glowing in the sunshine. 

We heard the bells of Notre Dame and I fell even more in love with that place. 

 Rue du Dragon was supposed to be an awesome medieval alleyway, but it looked blandly modern to me.

Victor Hugo's label. 

Apparently Victor rented the garret of this building when he was 19 years old.

Zoomed in on Victor's attic--looks nifty to me!

Dinner: frog legs.

Frog legs taste like chicken. 

We had raclette and fondue, plus a candle on our table: there were a lot of open flames in a very small crowded space, but it was yummy!

6. Solo Sunday in a Cemetery

On Sunday after lunch, Jeff needed to rest his various sore muscles and save his strength for an evening walk. It was our last day in Paris, and I could not bring myself to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon sequestered in a windowless hotel room! So I put my phone with its handy GPS and map in one pocket, and our little camera in my other pocket, kissed Jeff goodbye, and headed out for a small Sunday afternoon stroll. It turned into a five mile Sunday afternoon amble, but it was such a beautiful day, I didn't care! On my walk, I went to three places: Le Parc de Belleville, Le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, and Cimetière du Père Lachaise. Our hotel was somewhere in the middle of the oblong triangle made by connecting these three points. I definitely took a rather circuitous route without my JeffPS tugging on my hand at every intersection. Jeff is so good at figuring out directions that I started calling him JeffPS on this trip. Who needs GPS when you've got something even better? JeffPS to the rescue! Thankfully, my GPS was still effective and I managed to wander in the right directions eventually.

I thoroughly enjoyed the sheer heady freedom of wandering through the streets of Paris by myself. It was sunny and 50 degrees outside, and Parisians were out en masse, taking in the vitamin D. Our hotel was in an excellent neighborhood right next to two parks and the cemetery. I couldn't choose which one to go to, so I decided to do them all since it didn't seem that far on my map, and I had two whole hours to enjoy. The problem with being a runner is I expect traveling places on foot to be faster than it is at a walk. I walked for two and a half hours before finally arriving back at our hotel room! 

 First stop, three blocks from our hotel: Parc de Belleville and its sweeping city view. This park deserves its own post!

 Slipping down a side street towards the next park on my list.

 I was endlessly fascinated by the contrast between the smooth manicured building fronts and their rustic old brick sides.

I adored all of the flower shops. 

Corner buildings: another fave.

 Le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont was busy busy with runners and walkers and loungers. 

Before this trip, I didn't know Paris had hills other than Montmartre. This park had an old stone Italian-style gazebo up high as an interesting viewpoint (the dome peeking out of the trees just to the right of the tallest building in this picture).

The view from the gazebo, with Sacre Couer's iconic silhouette on the distant left horizon. 

 Zoomed in on that view of Sacre Couer.

 Another view from a butte.

 The shadow of the gazebo down low, city view up high.

 The gazebo from the suspension bridge. It really was quite hard to see the actual gazebo, covered in trees as it was.

 Heading out of the park.

 Walking down boulevards, sometimes I looked up a narrow side street and was greeted by an interesting church spire.

 Sunshine, white buildings, blue sky, tree-lined rue, and a little old French lady pulling her grocery wheely bag.

 After more walking than I anticipated, I arrived at the Pere Laichese Cemetary. It was very...three dimensional, with family crypts lining long walkways. I overshot it and ended up entering at the southeastern corner, instead of the northwestern corner like I planned, and the cemetery was MUCH larger than I anticipated. It was a significant hike to get through it to the north exit which was closest to our hotel.

 The trees seemed very skeletal to me.

 I suppose I should mention that about halfway through the cemetery, a friendly Frenchman offered to help me find a grave. He first asked me in French, but I understood ZERO of his words in his accent, and instead of asking him to speak more slowly, I lamely defaulted to "je ne comprende pas" and he ended up speaking English well enough to converse with me. I was not in the mood to talk with strangers, but he really wanted to show me to a grave, so I had him take me to Oscar Wilde's grave since I knew it was near the north side of the cemetery. He set off briskly, stepping between large tombstones and after weaving around for a while, we came out at Mr. Wilde's grave. 

There he was, protected by plexiglass from his endless admirers. A large group was hovering in front of the grave so I glanced at it, took a picture, thanked the French guy, and continued on my way.

 Somber solo cemetery selfie.

Paris: day 1

My account of our trip to Paris is not all chronological. I find writing to be easiest and most enjoyable when I write what I'm in the mood for in the moment rather than following a schedule or calendar. Paris-post number three is about day one. 

Let's start this off with an excited airplane selfie:

The way the timing of our flights worked out left me wide awake for the entire 14 hours of travel. That was close to fourteen luscious hours of reading time, and I used it well. I love having a Kindle full of fun books that are more interesting than the airplane movies! While I am hesitant to admit what I read, I was glad when a friend told me about these books so here's my bubblegum travel reading list: everything by Nichole Van. Humor, solid command of the English language, unapologetic time travel, clean romance, mild PG swearing, spunky writing style--in short, the perfect airplane read. I'm halfway through her last book, and I'm a little bit sad about it.

After 14 hours of travel, we arrived at the Charles de Gaulle airport at 7am on Valentine's Day (10pm back home). Our hotel check-in time wasn't till 1pm, though, so no naps for us! We took the train from the airport, navigated the metro to our hotel's neighborhood, and dropped our bags off with the helpful proprietress around 9am before heading out on an all-day Valentine date. We walked and wandered for nearly three hours, taking in the glorious Paris-ness of it all in the cloudy wet COLD till I was half frozen, then took refuge in a boulangerie with our first pastry of the week: beloved, classic pain-au-chocolat for me (chocolate filled croissant).

Soaking it all in. I have a thing for old cobbled streets. They add so much to the rustic, historic ambiance! Not to mention, they disguise a whole lot more city filth than plain old concrete or asphalt. 

Restaurant-shopping. I was too dull-witted and tired to take any pictures during our 3 hour walk before lunch, but trust me, it was scenic and Parisian, if a tad cloudy. 

Yum.

We browsed a blessedly warm cozy bookstore while waiting for noon when the restaurants would open. At the stroke of noon, we selected a rustic restaurant in the ever-affordable Latin Quarter and sat down to a classique 100 minute 3-course French luncheon. FYI, the Latin part of the Latin Quarter is not taco trucks; it refers to Latin the language, which the original scholarly inhabitants of that section of Paris spoke and studied at university. I still find it all very confusing/misleading.

After navigating lunch with a surly gray-haired French proprietor, we metro'd it back to our hotel and checked in at last. Jeff says the key is not to let the surly French people intimidate you, because most of them are automatically surly to linguistically inept English-speakers. But I am automatically intimidated by surly-ness in general, especially in a different language, especially especially in my third language, so I sat quiet as a mouse in my too-small chair while Jeff did all of the talking/asking/ordering/paying. I also felt only half awake, and my fuzzy jet lagged brain was not up to the challenge of attempting to make sense of my weakest language. It wasn't till the last day of our visit that I finally decided to try speaking a little more French myself, and even then, only in the safe-zone of church.

This little restaurant was quite quaint with stone walls and rough wooden ceiling beams. We usually order the menu, which is three courses, quoted with a specific exact price--all gratuity and any tax is included in the quoted price, so if you order the 10 euro menu, you pay exactly ten euros. It is so nice and non-mysterious. The restaurant provides 5-10 options for each course so you can mix and match what looks good. Maybe this explanation is redundant to some, but it's different than what I'm used to, and I love the menu system!

Jeff always likes to try interesting foods, and this time he had oysters with some sort of cream sauce for his first course. 

A steaming bowl of French onion soup with baguette and Emmentel cheese broiled on top is my absolute favorite antidote to that damp seeping cold. It's literally the ONLY time I ever like anything soggy. Baguettes were made to be soaked in that rich broth!

The main course. Yum. We were crammed into this itty bitty nook of a front window. My chair was pressed against a wall and I got slightly stuck when I tried to get up at the end. I was so cold it was all I could do to take off my hat and gloves. My bulky coat and scarf stayed ON. The front window that we were pressed up against was so drafty, my legs stayed icy the whole time. I tried putting my hat on my knees but it didn't help.

Upon depositing my backpack by the bed in our hotel room, I immediately laid down and fell into a scary-deep slumber. There was no transition: one minute I was awake, the next I was OUT. Staying up for 25 hours straight is hard! Jeff forced me to wake up at 4pm (I remember being really peeved about it). We video called our children and then walked up the street to the nearest little grocery store for some beloved French pantry staples: baguette, Camembert cheese, Yop yogurt, and Kellog's Extra (the most heavenly granola with toasted hazelnuts and chocolate pieces mixed in. I could write a love sonnet to Extra. Oh how I miss it!) After my four queasy ultra-barfy pregnancies, food in general does not interest me much. I don't really enjoy eating very many foods. I still eat, but it's annoying because I'm annoyingly picky after repeatedly puking up nearly everything available in our giant country for so many months. It's getting better with time, I suppose, but in general, food is not too exciting to me. But I get excited about Kellog's Extra with strawberry Yop on top. YUM. (and that French onion soup!)

France still uses plastic bags, by the way. I read a bunch of articles a few months ago about how we need to be more awesome like France and ban plastic grocery bags. Plastic bags were available at every store we went to in Paris. Another fun oddity we discovered: when a restaurant claims to sell tacos, they really mean their regular sandwich food, like kebab meat, will be wrapped in a tortilla instead of bread. Jeff and I got a kick out of that. In France, taco means the vehicle the food is wrapped in, not the style of food inside the tortilla. There was not a drop of salsa to be found. In the name of an authentic cultural experience, we steered clear of "tacos."

When planning this trip, our priorities when we searched for lodgings were location and availability of a kitchenette in the room. We struck GOLD this time around. The Hotel de Residence de la Mare was everything we could hope for in a relatively affordable European hotel--an enormous step up from our past situations. It was on a quiet dead-end street and our room opened up onto a private interior courtyard so it was even MORE quiet without any street even touching our walls. And the bathroom was over twice the size of our bathroom at home, which admittedly is not too hard to do, but felt luxurious nonetheless.

Back to day one, post-grocery shopping: we deposited the food in our kitchenette and took the metro over to the Eiffel Tower for a pre-dinner evening stroll.

 The evening sky was an interesting bluish color, and the wet pavement was artistically reflective. There were also quite a few people milling about, as usual. 

After sufficiently admiring Monsieur Eiffel, we hopped a metro and hiked back to our hotel for a quiet Valentine dinner of baguette, soft cheese, grape juice in wine glasses, and fruit:

We went on our very first date on Valentine's Day twelve years ago. Our twelfth Valentine's Day this year was easily the best!