May 20-21
Traveling was… well, traveling. Not particularly exciting, although trying to navigate French public transportation was interesting. I don’t have the vocabulary necessary for this, I’m afraid. That’s going to have to change. Mom commented drily on my eagerness to jump into the pool with my French, but that wasn’t entirely on the mark. I’m pretty reticent about going up to people and asking them for help, even when the folks at the information desks speak English.
Eventually, however, we made it to our hotel and got our luggage stowed. It’s a little room with two twin beds in a place on Rue de Constantinople, which Mom has difficulty saying. And then we were ready for a walk.
Now, you have to understand that when we got off the Métro, this was the first thing I saw.
So I think you can imagine which way we started to walk. I said that I wanted to go to Sacré-Coeur, and Mom asked where that was. So I pointed it out to her. “If I can see it, we can walk to it,” she said, and off we went.
It was further away than it looked, as I knew it would be. Sacré-Coeur is BIG, and on high ground to boot, so it was visible from across the 18e arrondissement, where we were. And getting there was not as easy as it looked, since French streets don’t exactly follow the grid pattern we’re used to in America. And of course, as we got closer and started up the hill, it disappeared behind the nearer buildings. “Just keep heading east,” I said, so we navigated based on our shadows (east is blessedly easy to find at noon on a sunny day) and the occasional glimpses we caught through alleyways and between buildings.
At the bottom of the impressively steep and narrow Rue Tholozé, we were briefly distracted by the sight of a windmill. No, it was not the famous Moulin Rouge, though we were indeed in Montmartre.
So we climbed the street to have a closer look at what turned out to be La Moulin de Galette. Which was cool. But this was about as close as we could get.
So we resumed our quest for Sacré-Coeur, which Mom by this point was referring to as “the damn church.”
We’re getting closer!
At last, we made it, though we made a stop at St. Pierre de Montmartre first. I think. At least, the sign outside this little church said St. Pierre; everything I saw inside said Notre-Dame de Montmartre. But it was old, and stone, and Gothic. And quiet. And moldy, which mom’s nose did not appreciate.
I do not have pictures of the inside of Sacré-Coeur, though I wish I did. It was large and impressive, especially the mosaic on the ceiling. But there were signs that specifically requested that we respect the constant prayer and adoration that’s been going on there since 1885 and not take pictures or video, so I put the camera away. And I tried not to analyze the architectural features of the basilica and just appreciate it as beautiful… but at that, I failed.
At this point, we decided to hunt down the infamous Moulin Rouge. And food, since it was going on 3 pm and we hadn’t really eaten since the plane. This was a little harder to find, as it wasn’t dead east of us and we couldn’t see it from a distance. So Mom asked for directions; they took us back down Rue Lepic and Rue Tholozé, where we stopped for sandwiches at a little outdoor café. And then, way down at the bottom of the hill, there it was.
That, however, was it for the day’s adventures. I got about two hours of sleep on the plane, which was most definitely not enough. When we flew to Hungary for the orchestra trip in high school, I remember getting three hours and still having the energy to make it to the end of the day without a nap. That, however, was in high school, when I was used to surviving on six hours of sleep every night. My body doesn’t really do that any more; having been deprived then, and then even more deprived last year, it now demands as much sleep as I can get. So by 2 pm (Paris time), I was dragging, and by 3:30, I was all but asleep on my feet.
Back to the hotel we went (and it seemed a much longer walk on the way back, even though it was downhill). I lay down at 4 to take a nap, causing Mom much consternation when both knocking and phoning the room failed to wake me up to let her in (she’d gone for bread and cheese at the marché across the street). It was only supposed to be an hour-long nap, but I most definitely did not want to get up when my alarm went off. So in essence, I went to bed at 4 pm. And when I woke up at 4 the next morning, I did some blogging.