Paris - Day Four

After the first proper nights sleep in ages, we awoke to light showers! Not to be deterred we packed up our bags and checked out of our apartment and headed back to Gare du Nord to put our luggage in storage for the day. This proved difficult, mainly because they lied on the map about where the luggage lockers were and they hid them from us.

Anyway we were shortly back in action and back in the city centre in line at the Louvre. We had briefly cycled through here on our biking tour but this time we got to see the glass pyramid structures up close. The Louvre was formerly the Royal Palace before Louis decided to move to Versailles to get away from the scum of the common people. There was massive controversy when the glass pyramids were installed in the courtyard by French President François Mitterrand in 1983, but the number of visitors to the museum doubled in the years following it so I guess he has had the last laugh.

The line wasn’t that long and we quickly found ourselves underneath the glass pyramid looking around at the millions of people and all the possible directions to go in, it really is enormous. It was like something out of a movie…say Di Vincie Code. We decided to head to the Mona Lisa first, just so we didn’t forget :). It was pretty amazing to see it after only seeing it in books for so long, but it is really small! We navigated our way around the hundreds of tourist parties and got this great shot.

We saw heaps of other Leonardo’s works, definitely awesome seeing the paintings Lou studied in Art History live and up close. Hamish enjoyed it but didn’t find any pictures of mortorbikes but did enjoy the Roman sculptures of warriors. We did a power tour of the rest of the museum, seeing lots of cool sculptures and other works of art from around the world.

By lunch time, we were museum-ed out and journeyed to our last stop on our itinerary - Montmartre. The tube stop we got off at was located in quite a rough neighborhood, and we didn’t really know what we were doing but if in doubt keep walking. We stopped at a bakery for lunch - another filled baguette….getting really sick of these by this stage.




We kept winding around the hill that had lots of pretty apartments with flowers spilling out the windows, until we came across the Saint Pierre de Montmartre church which is supposedly where the Jesuit order of the priests was found. This was pretty cool, but we pressed on until we found the village bit of Montmartre, we were confronted with heaps of artists that wanted to sketch us but we brushed them off and headed for another café where tried crepes for the first one. In most probably a psychological backlash against Sally Weller who forbade the consumption of Nutella when Lou was small, we ordered the Nutella variety and probably about 1 cup of Nutella got stuffed into this crepe and melted - in a word, amazing. Half of it ended up on Lous face though. 

 Feeling slightly sick we went up to the main church on top of Montmartre - the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur. This was built in 1876 to honour the French victims of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War. Its white dome is a highly visible landmark in the city like the Eiffel Tower and the Arc du Trimophe. The church was really beautiful, and it was a nice change that you couldn’t take photos inside and it made it feel more like a church. 

The area of Montmartre as the reputation of being the arty, creative part of Paris, and this has its origins because Montmartre was outside the city limits, free of Paris taxes and the local nuns made wine. We then sat on the steps and admired the view, which included one of the best street buskers we had ever seen doing tricks with a soccer ball, as well as probably the worst street performer we had ever seen - Canadian Dan.

By this stage we couldn’t take any more in so we decided to head back to the train station and have an early dinner and wait for the Eurostar home. We had a nice dinner at a café on the street, sitting outside people watching (the French line up their tables and chairs all facing the street so when you walk past you feel like you’re in a zoo!). We then collected our bags from the storage lockers and began the wait for our train, luckily Louise had packed part of her birthday present from Sally and David and we passed the time playing the World’s Greatest Trivia. Unfortunately Hamish won by one point and so this put a dampener on the entire holiday although Lou can gain merit for coming so close to a true genius.

We were welcomed back to London with freezing temperatures, pouring rain and tube strikes, but we still went to bed with smiles on our faces. Best holiday ever!

Highlight: Seeing the Mona Lisa and other famous works of art, it really is weird seeing them up close.
Lowlight: Getting a disappointing baguette - you just think that all food in France is going to be amazing.  
Interesting fact #1: Many artists had studios or worked around the community of Montmartre such as Salvador Dali, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.
Interesting fact #2: Nearly 35,000 objects from prehistory to the 19th century are exhibited in the Louvre, over an area of 60,600 square metres.