I Hate Paris in the Fall!

And for those of you who are fans of "French Kiss" with Meg Ryan, it's not because my love is there - with his slut girlfriend. No - I hate Paris because of it's completely incomprehensible subway system. As you can see from the map posted below, it has 1 million lines and none of them connect at points that are logical. It seriously takes one hour to get anywhere! This was the main factor in the most frustrating day of our trip.

Our first day in Paris started very early with a ride across the English Channel on the Eurostar train. I really would have liked to have used the three hour ride to sleep, but I had the French equivalent of my sister sitting right behind me. For those of you who know Jen, you know that her voice carries and she never stops talking. Well, that was the case with the French college girls sitting all around me and Trent. I'm glad they were having fun, but it did not make for a very peaceful ride!

When we arrived in Paris, we took a taxi to our hotel, the Hotel Relais Bosquet, in the Rue Cler neighborhood.

I had used Around the World Travel to book this hotel, and when we arrived, the desk clerk said that the travel agency had indeed made our reservation. However, the agency later cancelled the reservation! No idea why they did this, and when I checked with them upon our return home, the only response was that the reservation was no longer in their system, so they couldn't tell me what happened - not even a "Sorry." Luckily, the hotel did have some rooms available, or I would not have been a very happy camper. This hotel was not quite as impressive as our hotel in London, but it was clean and was one of the nicer hotels I have experienced in Paris. This was the view from our window.

After checking into the hotel, we headed out for lunch. We ate at Cafe du Marche near our hotel. Apparently, we arrived too early for lunch, but they said I could order a salad, rather than a pastry from the breakfast menu. Thinking I had found something on the menu, written in French, that I could identify, I ordered a caesar salad. What I got was not a caesar salad. I wish I had a picture of my food and my face when it was presented to me, but I was so disgusted, I didn't even think of it. On top of my lettuce and other veggies was a huge pile of pinkish, wet looking chicken. I later found out that it was meant to be an Indian spiced tandoori chicken, which accounted for the pink tint, but it just looked gross! I made the best of it and just ate around the chicken, but this 25 calorie lunch necessitated several snack stops later in the afternoon. We ate gelato from Berthillon, the most famous ice cream shop in Paris, and I also had a Nutella crepe, which is my absolute fave! Here is TMT showing off our gelato.

The original plan was to hit up some stores, but I quickly learned that shops in Paris are generally closed on Mondays, or only open late in the afternoon. So we switched gears and headed out on our Rick Steves' sightseeing walk. We started out on Ile de la Cite by famous bridge.

The highlights of our sightseeing tour were the French Supreme Court, Notre Dame, and the Louvre.

After spending hours completing our sightseeing tour, we decided to head to the Champs-Elysees. Unfortunately, TMT's metro ticket didn't work, and the lady working at the metro stop pretended not to speak English. We could not figure out what to do to get his ticket working. In hindsight, we should have just bought a one-ride ticket, but we were so frustrated that we just started walking. An hour later, we ended up at the Champs-Elysees, but decided that we better just give the metro another try, to make sure we had enough time to do the Eiffel Tower before dinner. At this point, my feet were absolutely killing me! I was very grumpy. What seemed to be a fairly short ride on the metro to the Eiffel Tower ended up taking quite a while because we timed the journey perfectly to coincide with Paris rush hour. Being crammed into a subway car with lots of Parisians for whom deodorant is optional was unpleasant to say the least! We arrived at the Tower and headed up in the elevator to the second platform.

While up in the Eiffel Tower, we saw a man who must have been terrified of heights. There are these steel beams along the interior of the platform. As his wife moved around the edge of the platform taking pictures, he would literally run from one steel beam to the next and just hold onto that beam for dear life! I can't describe how funny it was, but it definitely took my mind off my aching feet. Here's a picture I covertly took of this man runing from one beam to the next.

After the Eiffel Tower, we headed for the nearest Metro stop. At this point, I was starving and my feet still hurt! Trent saw a great photo opportunity, and braved my wrath by asking me to stop and take a pic. It did turn out great, and I'm glad we took it.

We headed across town to dinner at Chez Omar, which I had read great things about. Again, it took us about an hour to get across town. At least we had entertainment this time! A Chinese couple, who looked like they lived in America - based upon their clothes - got on the metro one stop after us. They got off to transfer at the same stop that we did. As soon as we all got off the train, the girl just laid into her boyfriend. She would yell in Chinese for about five minutes and then physically turn away from him. After about two minutes spent thinking about her next attack, she would go off again. We spent about forty minutes waiting for the train we were transferring to, and she yelled at him for pretty much the whole time. We couldn't understand what she was mad about, but he must have done something really bad because he just stood there and took it! We finally arrived at Chez Oamr, and again, I wish I had taken pictures of the food, but I was just too worn out to do it. I had read that the specialty was steak au poivre with frites. This is basically steak with a peppercorn mushroom sauce and fries. We asked that our steaks be cooked medium well, but they came out competely raw, with the exception of about one centimeter around the edges of the meat. So our dinner consisted of a plate of fries. After this disappointment, we headed back to the hotel, hoping for a better day on Day Two in Paris!