Un jour à Paris

The blog is late today since we were a little bit weary after our day-trip to Paris.

Our day started at 4:30am when we quickly got ourselves ready to catch a 5am local bus that would take us to St. Pancras International station, luckily from virtually right outside our guest house. London is very serene at that time of the morning. When we arrived we had to go through all of the check-in, immigration and security checking before we could sit down and have a coffee and muffin in lieu of a proper breakfast.

The Eurostar train to Paris was very comfortable, whisper quiet and very fast (maybe even as fast as Petra's uncle on the autobahn, which we think was our previous land speed record). After only a bit over half an hour we had reached the Channel Tunnel, which took us about 20 minutes to get through giving us the opportunity for a snooze in the absence of anything to look at except our fellow passengers. Then we were in France in bright sunshine. Unfortunately the sunshine didn't last as far as Paris and it was rather drearily overcast for the day.

We arrived at Gare du Nord in Paris around 10:30 local time (Paris being an hour ahead of London) and immediately jumped on a local train to Notre Dame where we had one of the most interesting toilet stops ever and viewed the cathdral from the outside...

The queues to get inside were already so long that we decided it would take too much of our short day in Paris before we could have a look, so only a bit reluctantly decided to move on.

The nearby Latin Quarter was our next destination. Lots of narrow streets with all sorts of cafes and other food sellers...

We just wandered around (often in circles) until we decided to have an early lunch in a cafe looking straight out at Notre Dame.

From there we started walking - about 6 kilometers we think. We visied Le Bon Marche, a Parisian department store that makes Selfridge's look like K-Mart, and eventually found ourselves at the Eiffel Tower...

Next was a cruise up and down the Seine before we hopped on a local train again to the Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysees (another famous street that we found disappointing).

By this time it was getting late, so we hurried off to Montmartre for our final stop. We took the obligatory photos at the Moulin Rouge (which we had to walk through Paris' red light district to find), then ventured into Montmartre's back streets and found a cafe where we could sit at tables on the footpath and sip red wine (Phil) or an oh-so-Parisian pina colada (Petra).

Another local train from Montmartre took us quickly back to Gare du Nord where we went through all of the check-in, immigration and security again and had a very nice baguette while waiting in the extremely uncomfortable "lounge" to board the Eurostar for the trip back. Not nearly as interesting a return trip as it was all in darkness, but we got back to St. Pancras on time at 9:30pm. Then the local bus back to Lambeth again. Quite a day.