Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

Vacation continued: 

One of the highlights of London is how easy it is to get out if and go to Paris instead.  You hop on a train at St. Pancras Station, and it deposits you at the Gare du Nord in Paris.

Well, I say “hop” but due to Brexit, you do have to go through a partially-assed passport control and customs check which is a little like being a sheep herded through a sheep dip, but once that’s over you sit on the train and munch half-French British Rail-style sandwiches and try not to think about the weight of water above you in the tunnel under the English Channel (or as the French call it, La Manche).

We stayed in an out-of-the-way hotel – a suite of rooms for around $100 a night – and utilized the French equivalent of an Oyster Card, a Navigo pass.  Same deal as the Oyster Card, you fill it up at a machine and rub it against ticket  turnstiles when you want to travel.  With a London Oyster Card, you sign in and sign out at your destination. With the Navigo, you just sign in. There’s no check of where you get off the Metro. 

I found it a bit more difficult to use, in that the first time I tried, I must have waited too long to push forward, or otherwise annoyed the Transport Gods, and the green “go through” light went out. And you can’t use the card at the same gate a second time! I assume that’s their way of preventing a traveler throwing the card to an accomplice outside the gate for a second journey, but I can’t think of a reason why they need to do that.

Anyway, one of the locals, seeing me gesticulating wildly in English, let me through the gate while his own light was green. After that, things went better.

I’d never been to Paris. I’ve been across the Channel on a ferry, notably during the Royal Wedding in 1981 when I could no longer face the  overload of Union Jack bunting in London. But we only went as far as Calais, on the coast, the spiritual home of Duty-Free fags and liquor.

I think everyone has a bucket list of what they want to see in Paris, and so did we, but since we booked the trip only a few days before we traveled, we couldn’t get tickets to 95% of them. (Places like the Louvre are famously booked up months ahead, and even then are seriously overcrowded.)  

Our first trip was to the Eiffel Tower. The summit was closed, but the lower two stages were accessible by steps (or an elevator if you booked early enough, which we hadn’t). Being a Northerner, I couldn’t help measuring it up against the Blackpool Tower, but I have to say that apart from the lack of world-class ballrooms, it is impressive. We climbed the stairs to the first stage and spent an hour looking over Paris. We set out for the stairs again and I’d climbed about nine steps before declaring the second stage could look after itself and I wasn’t going a step farther. 

Lining up for the Eiffel Tower

It is a very long way up and it was cold and windy but incredibly impressive in the way all Victorian cast-iron construction is.  It was built in a couple of years for a World’s Fair, with only a 20-year permit to stay up. (Obviously, that permit was extended.) The construction speed and determination of the people of that time was something else.

Eiffel Tower from ground level beneath it

The next item on the agenda was Montmartre. As the name suggests, it’s on a mount, so that entailed another tranche of steps. The websites explain that climbing the steps is like participating in some Film Noir or WWII drama, but cities are so crowded these days that it was more like participating in one of those religious pilgrimages where seven thousand people get trampled to death because someone stopped suddenly to tie their shoelaces.  There is a funicular (an elevator/train cross) that will take you up there, but my navigator (Hi!) led us up many flights of stairs while continually telling me the funicular was just a little further on. And so it was – the top of the funicular. Google Maps had led us to the top entrance instead of the bottom.

View of Montmartre Basilica

View of Montmartre Basilica

 Since we were already at the top, there was no use crying over it, so we explored. It’s a touristy area, of course, but the Basilica was beautiful and the restaurants around retained some of their Impressionist-era charm. 

We took the funicular down.

Montmartre from the bottom of the steps

Although we had the Metro travel-card, we walked a huge distance in Paris, six or so miles a day. Things are quite far apart (compared with London, which has its major landmarks in a tiny central area) but despite the cold they were pleasant walks. The city is well-laid out, with wide streets, reasonable traffic and dotted with architecture that extols the mightiness of the French state and the citizens’ need for proportion and beauty. The non-national buildings are in the characteristic Hausmann Style. We saw the Ramses Obelisk, in much better nick than Cleopatra’s Needle in London, the Arc de Triomphe and beautiful fountains.  Oh, and the Moulin Rouge.  One surprise was the Seine, which flows rapidly. The Thames seems to mosy along slowly, and sometimes when the tide’s coming in it seems to not flow at all, but the Seine runs like a small river coming down from a mountain. (Except much wider.) It was the sort of flow you wouldn’t want to fall into unless you’re an unusually strong swimmer.

Notre Dame had just reopened after a devastating fire gutted the interior and collapsed the roof. There are still cranes and builders’ huts around it but it’s back to its glory.  It was raining when we visited, and the Griffons were spouting water on the passers-by like something from Gotham City.

Notre Dame Griffon spouting rainwater

Montmartre Griffon

Montmartre Griffon

Fountain commemorating the Smurfs

Ramses' Obelisk

Moulin Rouge from the street

Next stop on the vacation was the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Southern Californians abroad: Central London State of Mind.

 Vacation continued, still in Soho:

We toured Carnaby Street, marveling that it’s still able to trade on its name 56 years after London’s swinging creaked to a standstill. All the modern big names are there, even though Lady Jane and Biba are long gone. We didn’t buy anything. But at least it wasn’t closed.

The Coffee Store

My old not-very-happy hunting ground, Patisserie Valerie, is gone now, but the tea and coffee store a few doors down is still there. I couldn’t see any of the thick, embossed tea bricks that so excited my imagination in those days, but  you can get them on Amazon now. No need to visit the inscrutable orient, or for that matter Soho. 

We did eat pastries from Soho – I had a Mont Blanc, which is not, as I thought, a type of pen – from a patisserie nearby. Or it may have been a boulangerie. In standard Soho fashion, all three square meters of the patisserie were packed so we were sent upstairs where twenty to thirty people shrank to fit themselves around five small tables in an area no larger than my bedroom. At intervals, waiters and waitresses would appear at the top of the stairs and attempt to give random pastries to punters, who would point fingers at each other and shout out who needed what. (Each newcomer learned who had ordered which pastry from the previous round of groans and finger pointing.) It was like an Alice in Wonderland tea party, but the cakes were heavenly.

Third Man Records, London

Fender Triplecaster on Third Man stage

Pedal Board on Third Man Stage

Third Man Stage in basement

Literarium, Third Man Records, London

Also on the menu, so to speak, were Third Man Records, Jack White’s record store, and the Sir John Soane’s Museum, a must-see. It’s been expanded since I was last there. Like the zoological-taxidermy addiction of Walter Rothschild, previous post, the architectural-stone jones of John Soane was quite insatiable and the museum, which is really just a London townhouse, holds so much carved and worked stone that it must be constructed of Tardis-material with steel foundations reaching below the Tube layer.

Talking of giant stone monuments, we also (after a couple of false starts) figured out how to queue for the British Museum. This *is* a place I visited many times while I lived in London, but seeing it again was wonderful. We spent a lot of time on the Elgin Marbles. (I’d never paid any attention to them before as my parents took one of their dislikes to them.) I then spent 90% of the remainder of the time in the Egyptian Rooms, a type of pilgrimage for me.

Below: Pictures of items from the British Museum Egyptian Collection

The British Museum, unlike most I’ve visited in recent years, has not dumbed down for schoolchildren and I’m pretty sure the schoolchildren don’t mind that. (There were a lot of them around, all engrossed.) There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of items on display, with cards giving basic details and there was a complete lack of “activities,” broken machines that show videos, broken machines that show how things were made or used, or crayons, coloring books, sandboxes or play bricks.

It would take days to properly explore the museum, but we didn't have days. We did have fun.

Vacation to be continued...