Paris Vacation 2018, part 3

Paris Vacation 2018, part 3

We pushed too hard over the first few days, which was why we were in a department store buying a pair of sneakers by Friday morning. Here’s how we wrecked Julie’s feet in less than 36 hours. After our Thursday afternoon stop at Camille’s we decided to head up to Montmartre to see Sacre-Coeur instead of going back to our apartment. We probably should have gone back to our apartment.

Paris is a pretty flat city, but there is one midsized hill that looks very prominent in context. It’s up at the very northern end of what was walkable from our apartment, and atop this hill (Montmartre) is a gleaming white cathedral—Sacre Coeur. Some of the most stunning sights in the city were actually views of the white church upon the hilltop. You could see it from the top of the Pompidou, and there was a great “wow, there it is!” moment along the Boulevard Housmann as you rounded a corner directly south of it. So, Sacre Coeur is pretty great. But getting there was a drag. Even with some baguette and coffee in our systems it was a LONG walk (in the brunt of the afternoon heat) up to Montmartre…and then UP Montmartre.

We passed through the wedding district on the way up, where there were dozens of bridal shops showing off white gowns and tuxedos, and passed by the Republique statue. (Stopping briefly on a park bench outside the McDonald’s there to pirate some wifi) We also went into an indoor market, then clomped up the hill into the swarm of tourists in search of a patch of shade.

We ended up finding a stone bench that was partially shaded by the walls of the lower promenade just under the cathedral. The view of Paris stretching out beneath us was spectacular. But the shade and a few sips of water were even better.

Water is not a public commodity in Europe. I can’t remember seeing a single water fountain for our entire time there, and when you go to a restaurant there’s no complimentary glass of water brought out to your spot. If you want water, you have to pay for it. It’s delicious mineral water, but since it costs pretty much the same amount as a glass of wine, I always just ended up ordering the wine. We were definitely both dehydrated by the end of the week, despite our best efforts to pack sufficient supplies for each day of walking. (J-I was not dehydrated. I took my Nalgene with me and faithfully filled it from our apartment each day.)

We read and stretched out in the shade, both having kicked off our shoes, for over an hour. We watched the tourists flit by and the souvenir sellers calling out to the passerbys to look at their miniature Eiffel towers or to buy a painting. We never made it up into the cathedral. It was nearly 4:00 and we hadn’t ever really had a proper lunch. We decided to start walking home and find some place to eat along the way.

After bridging some considerable distance about how one ought to choose a restaurant in Paris, we ended up at a bistro by the Republique. We had some truly spectacular food over our time there, and one meal that was just flat out bad. This was neither here nor there. I had steak tartare (and did not get sick from it) and some camembert. Julie had a salmon sandwich. We had, by the time we made it back to the apartment, walked almost ten miles. It was time to be done.

But we weren’t. We put our heads together to make a more concrete itinerary for the next few days and listed out all of the places we knew that we wanted to eat: Le Maison du Chocolat for chocolates, Ble Sucre for croissants, Pierre Herme for macarons, Amarino for ice cream, and so on. We ended up watching some episodes of Netflix food shows about Paris, and wrote down all the restaurants and markets that we liked the look of from that. And then we mapped them all out and made plans by neighborhood to see where we might go in smaller, more manageable chunks.

As tired and footsore as we were that night, we did head out once more. We walked down to the Place de la Bastille and got some ice cream at Amorino’s—perfect little flowers of gelato shaped into individual petals in a “cornet” waffle cone. We strolled back through a little cobbled alley that twisted through some apartments and was filled with ferns and hanging green plants. It was cool out, and just starting to get dark.

The next day we were planning on centering our day around the Tuileries. <Cue immediate Mussorgsky melody from Pictures at an Exhibition any time either of us said “Tuileries.”> The French take their public gardens very seriously. They are multi-generational works of art with perfect balance and symmetry that take massive public investment. Our plan was to find a comfortable spot in the shade and to spend the morning off our feet once we had secured a reading spot in the garden.

Our walk took us down the Rue de Rivoli, the main commercial thoroughfare beside the Right Bank. We passed the Louvre along the way, which was as enormous as advertised. There is a semi-permanent carnival at the entrance to the Tuileries that our boys, had they been there, would have loved. A huge Ferris wheel, spinning cups, carousels—and all of it was empty. We had started before the rest of the city again, and we had the park pretty much to ourselves for the first hour we were there.

It was a beautiful morning, but when we stood up J’s feet had reached the limit. She’d packed comfortable and sturdy Keen sandals, but whenever debris from the street kicked into the sandal part it was rubbing her soles raw. Fortunately there are more than a couple places where you can buy a pair of shoes in Paris.

We walked (or, in her case, limped) up towards the Opera and the famous Galeries Lafayette. We were passing through the High Fashion corridor—the place where Paris fashion week starts and ends. Julie says it was a bit like stepping into an issue of Vogue. The price tags alone were dizzying, let alone the handsome suited Frenchmen attempting to woo in deep-pocketed tourists.

Two things stuck out about all of the Paris “malls” that we went to—first, that they all took male fashion as seriously as female fashion. If there were four floors of women’s clothing, you could expect four floors of men’s offerings as well. Second, merchandise wasn’t broken up into storefronts, but grouped together by kind and sold by a representative in in front of his or her company’s shelf of offerings. For example, Julie bought Puma shoes from a Puma employee who had one wall in a massive floor of all of the mall’s women’s shoes.

J: I bought a pair of white tennis shoes. All of my people watching from the previous two days had informed me that would be a safe bet for blending in. And I needed a pair of shoes that I could wear socks with because of the condition my feet were in—I’ve never had blisters on the bottoms of my feet before.

Her countenance improved dramatically when we stepped out of the mall and she could walk normally again.