20230506 Paris day 3 - a day on the island over the New Bridge

Paris day 3 - A low-key day exploring Pont Neuf and more

Trip day: 17 / 21

Before I get into today’s low-key adventures, I want to talk about our experience in Paris so far with some observations.

First – the French.  If you’re a customer in a restaurant, store, hotel, or wherever, the French are wonderful folks.  Friendly, helpful, understanding that you don’t speak French – especially if you try with a “Bonjour” or “Parlez-vous anglais?”.  They’re amazing.  Contrast that with the French that are walking on the sidewalk.  They will walk right through you, have no regard for anyone else, and force you to become as rude as they are if you want to get onto a train, bus, elevator, escalator – whatever.  The number of times we have had to come to a dead halt on a sidewalk because even though we moved to be single file in a narrow passage, the oncoming folks barrel ahead, four-abreast, full speed.  It is a weird dichotomy where you’d assume there would be harmony.

Why is this last piece important?  I’ll give you an example.  Yesterday, at Versailles, there were roughly a crap-ton of people.  It was seriously mobbed.  Trying to shuffle step from room to room when most of the others (who were speaking French) just shoved past us, bumped us out of the way, or were generally rude.  Today, a woman went for the escalator at the same time as we did.  Arlona paused, smiled, and waved her ahead.  She got a goofy look on her face, semi-smiled, and responded with a surprised-sounding, “Merci”.  Courtesy in public is not only unusual, it isn’t expected.  That is not more evident anywhere than on the roads.  Wow.

Another thing we’ve noted is that people are literally everywhere.  No matter where we’ve been these last three days, there are throngs of people.  People walking.  People eating.  People drinking.  People driving.  People on scooters.  People on bicycles.  People on motorcycles.  People smoking - seriously, everyone here seems to smoke. We haven’t been on a non-crowded sidewalk.  The subway trains and buses have all been standing room only no matter the direction or time of day.  Paris is a crowded place.

OK, enough rambling.  On with today’s admittedly slower pace activities.

Before we arrived in Paris, I checked the weather forecast for our stay.  I was not happy. We would arrive on Wednesday.  Starting Thursday evening, the temps were predicted to drop from the 70s to the low 60s, and rain was predicted 60% or higher for the remainder of our stay.  Woo-hoo, right?  Well, Wednesday evening was beautiful.  Thursday was beautiful.  Friday has a couple of spits of rain, but only when we were indoors anyway, and the temps hit the 70s.  Today (Saturday), we hit 70 once again and the rain is predicted to hold off until later tonight.  I guess the weather gods heard that the Kolbs were in Paris and they should do us a solid.  We’ll see if our weather luck continues to hold out tomorrow.

Today, we slept in as much as we could, ate breakfast in the nice buffet included at the hotel, and then…lounged in the room for another hour.  It felt good to just relax a little.  Then, we were off for Pont Neuf – the New Bridge (funny since it opened in 1607) -  that leads across the Seine to one of the islands in the river.  The Louis Vuitton store at our stop featured this fun art installation.

We crossed over Pont Neuf, where there is a statue of Louis IV.

Conciergerie - a 14th-century palace and prison

Snorkeling the Seine

Some of the faces below Pont Neuf.

They sure have fancy government buildings

Notre Dame is on this island as is Sainte-Chapelle.  Our wanderings took us by both of those as well as south from the island to the Sorbonne and the Panthéon.  Since Notre Dame is still closed from the fire, we obviously could only walk by.  We did the same as Sainte-Chapelle as they charge a fee to enter and have a strict no-photography policy.  As a photographer, a big part of my tourist experience revolves around capturing images of what I see.  Yes, I’m sure it’s beautiful, but on our world cruise, we saw so many absolutely amazing churches, cathedrals, basilicas, and mosques, at some point, they begin to look the same, or at least don’t offer anything we haven’t seen before.

Notre Dame

Charlemagne and His Paladins

The Virgin of Paris

The pigeons were not impressed by the gargoyles

Another fancy government building

Sainte-Chapelle

We walked south off the island and headed through the Latin Quarter on the way past the Sorbonne.

Fontaine Saint-Michel 1860

A pop-up market

This is a Wallace Fountain circa the 1870s– if you look closely, you can see the stream of water flowing in the center - you can drink from it

An interesting concept for a resale shop – all used clothing is sold by weight

We’ve seen several statues wearing “clothes” protesting French President Emmanuel Macron

Sorbonne University

We continued on to the Pantheon.  Again, we’ve seen tombs, so we passed on going in.

Panthéon

Panthéon

Eiffel Tower in the distance

We took the advice of our friend, Lisa, and headed toward Galeries Lafayette Maison, a multi-floor food mall across the street from Galeries Lafayette Boulevard Haussmann.

Printemps – an enormous department store

Our lunch destination

We eat at Starving Club – they had a daily special of fish & chips that was wonderful

We picked up a couple eclairs on the way out and headed over to Galeries Lafayette to browse

The only way to describe Galeries Lafayette is insane.  It is multi-blocks, multi-floors of everything from general clothing, jewelry, and other department store goods to high-end designer goods from nearly every top-end designer you can think of.  And…the place was packed!

One of the buildings sits under this amazing domed ceiling

After wandering through parts of this megastore, we decided that it was enough for today.  The #9 Metro train that stops right at our hotel also stops at the Galeries Lafayette so we hopped yet another jam-packed train and came back toward the hotel.  We decided we wanted something to drink in the room so we found a small grocery store and picked up some Coke Zero (and maybe a little gin…) and headed to the hotel for the evening.  We’re still a little tired from the last two days and last night's after-midnight bedtime.  With the late lunch, neither of us was hungry for dinner so we wrapped up our day at about 6PM.

Our fingers are crossed that we continue with good weather luck.  We’ll figure out tomorrow…tomorrow.