Sunday 20241006
Fortunately my sinuses were in better shape today, and I am hopeful that this will be just a one to two day head cold. We had breakfast at the hotel, then it was off to the train station Gare de Lyon Part Dieu to catch the TGV to Paris. It was about a 15 minute walk from the Citadines, and we already had our tickets which we purchased before leaving home. The only problem was that we had seat numbers that did not seem to exist, but we took two empty seats and settled in. We were on the upper deck in second class. The train had free wifi and it was pretty good. But for the sake of a little more security I was connected on this trip through a VPN, in this case one I got with Surfshark. I would not want to be using public wifi without that protection.
In just two hours we were in the Paris station, and took a cab to our residence. It is a small apartment, and it will be tight when Eileen and Felix are here, but the price was right. Our host tried to give us a lot of information, but he didn’t speak much English and we don’t know much French so it was sort of hilarious. One major perk with this place is that there are several fruit and vegetable stands and a Carrefour supermarket within a block. So we got all of our staples at the Carrefour and then added clementines, apples, and tomatoes from one of the stands. Then we finished unpacking and made our dinner salads.
While having dinner we started planning for some of our day trips. Tomorrow we have the Hop On-Hop Off bus, and that is a 20 minute walk away, and they don’t even start until 9:30 am. But our day trip to the Normandy Beaches on the next day has us meeting the pick up at 6:45 am a lot further away, and the buses are not running early enough. A little online research showed me that there is an app called G7 that everyone in Paris uses and you can book a trip from your phone, including in advance. So I downloaded the app, and in short order had a confirmed taxi ride at 6:15 am Tuesday for about 22 Euros, including the tip. Right now I am guessing we will be using this app a lot for convenience. And that finishes our planning for now.
Monday 20241007
We had a somewhat leisurely start to the day because the Hop On-Hop-Off bus did not start until 9:30. So we left at 9:00 and walked down to the starting point. We stayed on the bus at first just getting our bearings, and when we got to the Eiffel Tower we got off because that was where the boat ride on the Seine left from. We got on and enjoyed the cruise for about an hour, then got back on the bus to complete the loop. After one go around, plus the boat ride it was somehow mid-afternoon, so we decided to return to the Champs-Elysee stop, where we got off and went to the Arc de Triomphe. It sits in the middle of a big traffic circle where twelve roads come together, but there is a tunnel you can take to get from the sidewalk to the Arc. Then we bought tickets to go up. It was a killer ascent on a spiral staircase that seemed infinite. We definitely got our cardio in climbing that, and had to sit, catch our breath, and get our heart rate back down before making it out on the roof. The view is really quite spectacular, and we took photos to prove it. After we finished with the Arc, we again boarded the bus, and rode to Opera Garnier, which was the last stop. We got off and walked back to the apartment as the rain started to increase. We stopped at Carrefour for more salad and vegetables, and after dinner our landlady Isabel came by to explain the workings of the machinery, like the washing machine, dishwasher, and microwave. Thus ended the day.
Tuesday 20241008
We got up at 5am in order to meet our taxi from G7 at 6:15, which took us to Eglise Notre Dame de Compassion, the pickup spot.The streets were a lot less crowded at that hour! At the pickup a coach soon arrived and we boarded. The Normandy Beaches are a good 4 hours from Paris, so we were in for a long day. But we had two guides, John and Ash to keep us company. For the first hour or so everyone slept on the bus, until John played the Everly Brothers “Wake Up, Little Susie”. Then John gave us a recap of Franco-German history beginning with the Franco-Prussian war. I’m sure some of us didn’t need it, but it was not a bad summary, and it served to keep people entertained on a long drive. Shortly after 11am we arrived at Utah Beach, which is located on the Cotentin Peninsula and is the furthest west of the 5 D-Day beaches. We started with the Museum there, but we didn’t have enough time to really see everything. That is the problem with a one-day trip to such an historic site. Then we went on the beach, and John drew maps in the sand to explain how D-Day unfolded.
Then it was back to the bus, and Ash took over with some more general history of France, going back to the Gauls and the Romans, and how Paris was founded by a tribe of Gauls called the Parisiis hence the name of the city. This occupied us until we reached the town of Isigny, which is purported to be the ancestral home of Walt Disney. If you say someone is from Isigny in French, it would be d’Isigny, so the derivation comes from this. In Isigny we had lunch at a restaurant, but the only thing Cheryl and I could have was the fish and the coffee. We of course had brought appropriate food for ourselves.
After lunch we went to the Pointe du Hoc, which is a high point on a cliff between Utah Beach and Omaha Beach. The Germans had installed guns there which could bombard both of the beaches, and they had to be taken out. Aerial bombardment had not gotten it done, so it was up to the Army Rangers to scale the cliffs and spile the guns, which they did using Thermite grenades which welded the parts together and made the guns unusable. We toured the main blockhouse there, and saw the bomb craters left from D-Day, which even after 80 years of erosion are still pretty big.
From there we drove by Omaha Beach to the American Cemetery. It is maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, which was established by President Harding in 1923 following WWI. We got there just in time to witness the ceremony of lowering the flag, to the accompaniment of Taps. We then went to a lookout overlooking Omaha Beach, then toured some of the monuments there. John took one of our party who had a relative buried there, and they were given VIP treatment and a very nice ceremony, which is standard for the relatives. But neither of us had any relatives in this cemetery.
After that we had a 4 hour bus ride back to Paris, arriving around 8:30 pm, where we caught a cab back to the apartment, and then to bed.
Wednesday 20241009
Today we had a walking tour of Montmartre, and it rained all day. I think we are going to see a lot of that on this trip. Our guide was Marcela McCormick, a young lady from Colombia who is an artist but also does tours to supplement her income, because of course art does not pay. As she quipped, artists talk about money, and rich people talk about art. There was a French couple joining us, so Marcela had to switch between languages, and at times you could tell she was not sure which language she was in, but she did a very good job. And of course neither English nor French is her native language, coming from Colombia.She was very knowledgeable, and carried a book of images that she referred to as we went along.
Montmartre is on the highest hill in the city of Paris, and the view would undoubtedly be spectacular if not for the weather today. And at the top of the hill is Sacre Coeur, which is in basilica form. It was started in 1875 by rich people, at a time when much of Paris was starving. You see, in 1870 there was the Franco-Prussian War, which France lost, and this led to yet another revolutionary commune, and misery throughout the city. But they persisted, and building it was quite the feat. All of the Stone had to be hauled up the steep hill by animal power. But they built a very large Church even though there was an existing parish church right next door, which we visited as well later on. When we were there, Mass was being said, but we were allowed to enter as long as we kept quiet.
The Mass was being said in the center of the building, and we went around the outside of this central area, to where there were numerous side chapels devoted to different saints. There were some very nice mosaics, and Arches that gave you a view of the decorations in the central part of the church since there were walls marking off that area. Then we went outside and looked at the statues of St. Louis (Louis IX) and Joan of Arc on the front of the Church, and of Jesus high in the center. Then around the side we saw the gargoyles, and in this weather we could see them performing their primary function, collecting and directing rain water from the building.
From there we walked to the Pl. du Tertre, right next door, which is a place where artists can set up in the summer and sell their wares. The idea is that they will create the works there and then sell them, so they are not allowed to sell prints made in China. There were of course cafes all around. Montmartre was originally a cheap, out-of-the-way place, which of course attracted artists, and painters like Monet, Renoir, Degas, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec all worked here. We saw from the outside the studio where Picasso worked. And on the hill where the wind was good it made sense to set up windmills to grind the grain and crush the grapes. We saw one such wind mill, and when you know that the word for mill in French is “moulin”, you can see why the Moulin Rouge night club has a windmill on the roof. Toulouse-Lautrec made the nightclubs and the Can-Can dancers famous all over the world. The dancers were often artists’ models as well (though sometimes they were prostitutes).
As we finished, with the scheduled tour, we took our leave of Marcela and returned to the other church I mentioned. St. Pierre Saint Pierre de Montmartre, built in 1147, was the church of the prestigious Montmartre Abbey. On 15 August 1534, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Francis Xavier and five other companions bound themselves by vows in the Martyrium of Saint Denis, 11 Rue Yvonne Le Tac, the first step in the creation of the Jesuits. This was a very Romanesque church, but it has more modern decoration as well, including stained-glass windows from a single artist commissioned in 1953. I was tipped off to not miss this by my friend Steve Whiting.
After this we walked back through the rain to the apartment, but on Rue de Martyrs we saw a middle eastern eatery and stopped for a very welcome to-go order, then it was off with the wet clothes.
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