Blog Day 7 Monday June 23

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Paris

We got up kind of early and headed over to get inside of Notre Dam Cathedral.  This structure dominates much of Paris and we have seen it from many different angles, but from not inside. How many times can we say “Wow!” ? But “Wow” again.  The windows, the construction, the gargoyles.  It is all amazing.  The highlight was, about ten minutes into our visit, a choir from Oregon filed in to the front of the church and began singing.  The first song was “Deep River”….they sounded like angels. Patti was pretty sure they were Americans, which was confirmed later.  Hearing singing like this in a building that is 800 years old with out of this world stained glass was such a joy!  We stayed longer than we had planned just because it seemed impossible to leave.  What a blessing.

After lunch, we took a bus to the Eifel Tower.  No matter where you are in Paris, you most often can see it sticking up in the sky, but up close it is clear who really massive it is!  We didn’t have a lot of time, because we wanted to try to catch up with Teo’s UCLA class to join in on a fascinating lecture and walking tour of an area just south of where we are living.  Unfortunately, it was not meant to be.  We rushed to find a Metro station from the Eifel Tower and then waited 15 minutes for the train.  Apparently we missed the group by about 5-10 minutes.  Our friends, Tina and Marybeth, were able to hook up with the group and reported it was great.  Sigh!  Sometimes the connections just don’t line up.  We so appreciated the invite, but walked around for quite a while looking for them and never did see the group.

So, we had to do what travelers must do at times, regroup and make a new plan.   This has already happened to us several times on this trip and will happen again without a doubt before we are done.

We walked for a while, and then Patti remembered another museum close by, The Cluny Museum.  We had seen a clip about this museum, which has some exquisite large woven tapestries from the year 1500 of the lady and the unicorn. Wow! Thinking about how often we throw out cloth if it is “old” at 20 years old. These were in perfect condition after more than 500 years.

And as a bonus, we got to see super up-close some panes of stained glass, including some  from  St. Chabelle that we had visited a couple days ago. We could tell that the glass was beautiful when it was dozens of feet in the air, but to have it down where we could really see and photograph it, was wonderful.  The whole museum was build on a combination Roman baths site from the year 100, and a fancy hotel that was build for visiting monks in about 1500.  A great additional stop.

We were also able to stop in at Shakespeare and Company, a classic English-language used bookstore.  Here writers like Ernest Hemmingway hung out, wrote and “found themselves”.  It seemed strange to see so much writing in English after a week of French.  Cool, but we didn’t need to get any more “English fix”, so left to walk yet again past Notre Dam.

For dinner, Patti got one of her wishes of buying crepes from a street vender. We got both savory crepes (cheese and tomatoes, and one that was chicken,) and sweet ones (one caramel, and one with Nutella).  Dick was able to duly record every step of the process. And an extensive process it was.  They tasted as good as they looked. Yummmmy!

We took these treats back to the apartment and then had a delightful evening with Tina and Marybeth sharing adventure stories of the day and week, and then moving into watching some of the World Cup soccer games.  Ramon and Sandra were back briefly, but went out again because they wanted to find a bar where the Mexican soccer game was being broadcast. They found one, where they cheered Mexico on for a 3 to 1 win.  Yah!

Patti went to bed kind of early, while Dick worked hard to try to get caught up on photos for the blog.  Having some many amazing photos (hundreds of them already), outstanding adventures, plus having four friends in the apartment with us has made it hard to be as regular with our reports as when we have traveled just by ourselves.  If you have been waiting for our entries, sorry about that.  We will hopefully use some of the time on the trains as writing time.  In the meantime, we are soaking it all in.  We may just go ahead and post the written text and add in the photos later.

Time is running short in Paris now, so the cool things that we want to make sure that we get done are beginning to burn a hole in our pockets.  But is has been great.

“I like The Eiffel Tower because it looks like steel and lace.”
― Natalie Lloyd