Paris

You can hit all the major tourist destinations in Paris in one day. Major, meaning The Louvre (housing the Mona Lisa), Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. You can hit them all, but you really shouldn’t.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have much choice. When your schedule dictates little more than eleven hours in Paris, you have to make the most out of it. Fortunately, I was armed with my trustee translator/girlfriend Deb, who has been to Paris and actually knew her way around the city relatively well.

The day started at 4:00 in the morning. That’s right, while folks at home were bedding down at 11 at night, I was rising and showering in preparation for the first tube train of the day to carry me to the newly remodeled St. Pancras International train station.

The early hours aside, it great to have an international train station on an Island. It is even better when that station is a remodeled one that opened less than a month ago. The place is gorgeous. Its waiting area has leather seats and wood floors while glass doors keep the cold air of the boarding area out. The trains sit at a level above the rest of the station, and you go up tilted moving walkways to get to them. Its really nice for suitcases.

The high speed trains leaving St. Pancras aren’t quite as new. Eurostar has been around for awhile, and its seats look like they were build tin the 1980’s. Still, the rail is new, and it can carry a train moving up to 186 miles per hour. I doubt we made that speed because it was raining on our trip, but we went from London to Paris by train in just two hours and 15 minutes.

I missed most of the journey though. That 4 a.m. waking time put me to sleep on the train, and I fell asleep just outside London and woke up outside of Paris. I missed going through the chunnel!

An itinerary of our day in Paris looks like a weekend trip. We started by going to Sacré Cœur, Sacred Heart Basilica, which sits up on a hill and overlooks Paris with a great view. It is also some pretty nice architecture itself. We saw Place de Vendôme, a large green pillar that disrupts traffic in an expensive shopping district. The Opera House was around there, too. We also saw The Louvre and the Mona Lisa, Notre Dame and, of course, the Eiffel Tower.

Because we walked to all of those places, I got to see plenty of Paris. The city seems to have been purposefully built to not allow you to walk on one street for more than one block, since there are very few roads that stretch that far. Sidewalks are also a luxury that gets little space. But it definitely has its own flavor. My personal impression is that Paris as a whole doesn’t want to leave the glory days of the 1920s, and its plethora of neon signs and style of artwork. And that suits the city just fine.

Because we were walking, we stumbled upon Mary Magdalene Church, which looks like a Roman temple from the outside. It is definitely a Catholic church inside, though. It might be my favorite church I’ve visited this trip because of the fascinating architectural dichotomy.

I’ll skip to the big three things we did to spare you more tales of tiny city streets and tourists taking pictures. The first of those things is the Louvre and the Mona Lisa.

The Louvre is enormous. It’s an old palace turned into an art museum, and walking through it takes awhile. Eventually, though we found the Mona Lisa, which had the obligatory gaggle of tourists surrounding it. Personally, I was surprised by how big it was. Everyone always talks about how they are surprised at how small it is, and this had be geared up to see a painting the size of a postage stamp. It isn’t. It’s significantly larger than most television screens.

After taking in a few other pieces of art at the Louvre, we sadly had to leave and head over to Notre Dame. We got to snap pictures inside, which is a nice departure from England, where I am used to a bunch of figures in red cloaks running after you anytime you even think about a camera. All of Paris was very accepting of pictures, which was wonderful. The real nice thing about Notre Dame is the back, though. Flying buttresses surround the curved end of the church, making for a very nice effect.

From there we headed over to the Eiffel Tower. By this time it was very dark, rainy, and cold. Sadly it had rained on and off all day, and my socks were soaked. We were very wet and shivering by the time we reached the tower.

We took elevators to the top, where it was even colder and extremely windy. The great view was worth, it though. I’m glad we did the tower last, because I could pick out the different places we visited during the day.

After coming back down from the tower, we had to hurry to Gare du Nord (the train station) to catch our train. This necessitated taking the Metro, which was not an easy task. The station just next to the Eiffel Tower was closed, so we had to walk a good way to find another station that was open. Once there, Deb allowed her linguistic skills to take over and found out the best way to go from the attendant. I have to hand it to her: afterward she was disappointed because her grammar was wrong. Considering they had a lengthy discussion, I think she did rather well.

She also did a good job navigating the city. Normally, she has the sense of direction of a depolarized compass and I won’t let her near a map. But I could tell she wanted to be the one to navigate Paris, since she’d been there before, and let her take the lead. I don’t know whether she knew the city, but she certainly exceeded expectations.

I managed to stay awake the entire way back, although I was exhausted. The chunnel didn’t seem like much since It was already dark outside. We were riding along in the dark, then were riding along in the dark tunnel, then were riding along in the dark again.

If you’re exhausted from reading this, and you should be, imagine how tired I was after living it. It’s a shame we didn’t have two or three days to do it all.