Paris 2005: Day 1

I'm sort of skipping the real day 1, Friday, given that the only things that happened on it were flying, getting mildly lost, and sleeping. We start our adventure, therefore, on Saturday.

First, a little about where I was staying. I had a room booked at the Hotel du Marais, located at 2, bis Rue Commines, in the Marais section of town, which falls somewhere between the 3rd and 4th arrondisement. The Marais is a really lovely neighbourhood, with lovely buildings and shops. My room was essentially a glorified broom closet, but it was clean and comfortable, and given how little time I spent in it, I really wasn't all too bothered by its minute proportions.

On Saturday I left the hotel at about 9:00am and began looking for a place to have breakfast. I stopped at a small cafe named Florio, at the corner of Rue du Turenne and Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. The lovely looking waiter spoke "a leetle" (picture thumb and index finger closing in on each other, as it accompanied every "a leetle" that I would encounter henceforth) English and brought me my petit déjeuner, which included a baget (too hard), a coffee, an orange juice and holy batman, the most awesome buttery croissant I'd ever tasted.

I quickly ate my breakfast (8.50€) and headed towards the nearest store in which I could buy a scarf, for I had underestimated how cold I would be, in this case the BHV department store across from Hôtel de Ville. From there I headed over to the St. Paul metro station, to join the Le Marais walking tour offered by the Paris Walks tour company. There was a small crowd gathered around a lovely looking fellow just handing him money, so I assumed I was at the right place. After he'd taken our money he thanked us and told us our real guide would be coming around shortly, while he took the loot and went to the pub.

He was really quite funny (and well, kind of dreamy) and it was a great way to start the tour. After introducing himself as Jonathan, he stood us around in a circle and gave us a short history of Paris, in which I got to star as the great wall of Paris. He also treated us to a rather hilarious account of the public pay toilets spread throughout the city.

Here are some of the sites we saw (click on thumbnails for larger images).

During the tour I'd met a lovely Australian named Anita and we decided to go to lunch together afterwards. We popped into a place at Place de Vosges and Place de Bourgogne. We chatted amiably over lunch and decided to scoot over to the Musée d'Orsay. I should qualify this by saying that I'm really not a big fan of museums, but everyone told me this was the one place I had to go, so go I did. The museum is housed inside a turn of the century train station, and is really quite gorgeous. Anita kept acting like my sugar mommy and insisted on paying for my lunch, the museum entrance fee AND the audio guide. We started off looking around together, but soon drifted apart to look at the different displays, agreeing to meet up at the audio guide desk at closing. There were three particular things that really impressed me at the museum.

The first being the building itself, the second being the lovely furniture exhibit, and the third being an exhibit called Chruches: East or West?, which features images of churches done in a drafting style. It was just beautiful.

All in all, I was pleased to have picked this museum to fill me museum quota. I finished my roaming a little before Anita so while I waited for her I consulted my map, which told me that the Champs-Elysées were nearby, so when we walked out, we decided to go find them. We unfortunately turned right instead of left, and ended up walking the wrong way up the Tuileries, towards the Louvre. Undeterred, we turned around and marched along Rue Rivoli in the other direction. We stopped off for a hot chocolate at a cafe, at which point Anita said her goodbyes. She only had one more day in Paris and had to get some sleep so she could tackle it with full force.

Even though my legs were killing me by this point, I decided to keep going, and kept thinking I was going the wrong way, but there seemed to be a lot of people going in the same direction, so I just kept on trucking. I finally came upon the street, and wasted no time finding Sephora, where I quickly and efficiently dispensed with 147€.

In spite of being almost unable to put one foot in front of the other, I marched on to the end of the street to have a look at the Arc de Triomph, which is quite a formidable structure.

And with that, I decided to call it a night. I took the metro back to my hotel and was thrilled to discover a message waiting for me there from my friend Laurent. I called him up and we made plans to meet the following afternnon. Squee! I have so much to say about Laurent, but it'll have to wait for my next entry.

Posted by raptorgirl at December 25, 2005 03:58 PM