Sun, 26 Oct 2003

author Tim	location Paris, France
posted 21:53 CET 31/10/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/France/France 2 ( all photos )

Into Paris - Louvre ( 30 photos )
(Continued from España 1)
It's a little confusing due to the fact that daylight savings stopped but the bus clock didn't follow suit, but I think it was around the second 3am that I got sick of the annoying bus seats, rolled over and noted that people on the other side were lying back in considerably more comfort than us.
We had searched in vain when first getting into our seats for the button to make the backs lean back, but now my search started again in earnest. This was so uncomfortable that I just had to find that button! In the end it was in the one place we hadn't looked, and upon pressing it in my sleepy state, a kind of nirvana was entered as the back rest slowly glided back!
I hastily woke Liz, but hers proved even harder to find as she had the window seat. Still, it was managed and we slept much better after that. Our backs never really forgave us for that journey, but that's the price to pay for cheap travel I guess. The guy behind us was a bit disappointed that we finally worked it out also, as he had been enjoying the extra space. Tough luck!
Around 6am we stopped again at a no-name truck stop where people (including myself) heaped in coffees to enable them to face the day - it would be far worse than our situation to have to go to work after a night like that.
A little while back now, when Rosie blew her last puff of smoke, Liz and I sat down and made a list of the things that we would miss most if we flew home directly from Padova, calling it quits. Most of those we have done - Rome, Spainish Food, etc., but first and foremost on the list was Paris.
Some of the places we go to are pretty obscure (although less so now that we don't have the van), but Paris is one that doesn't really need much explaining. Even if you ignore the tourist sites such as the Eiffel Tour and the Louvre, it is still a pretty compelling city. And, as we were to discover, an amazingly beautiful one.
The bus finally trundled into Gare Routière Internationale, on the eastern edge of the city. The 15 hours had passed amazingly quickly, even though the first half had been done without the aid of the seat's magic button. We were more than glad to get off at the end, however, and try to learn another city's Metro system to get us into the middle of town.
I really love Metro systems - it's most probably an extension of my childhood fascination with trains. The Paris one is really old, on par with London's, and just as big and confusing, if not more so. We found a really cool old board where you pressed a button next to the name of any of the three-hundered or so stations, and it lit up the path through the Metro system, showing you where to change and so on, helping you to navigate between the 16 Metro lines, 5 RER lines and two tram lines.
We walked to a ticket counter and purchased a carnet of ten tickets, and the girl even voluntarily gave us a map of the system! I think the stories of the nasty-tempered unhelpful French are slowly receeding into myth.
We journeyed from Gallieni smack-bang into the middle of town, emerging top-side once again at pont Neuf. Since pont means bridge, we had found ourselves right on the Seine, the river running through Paris. It divides the city into the Left Bank (south) and the Right Bank (north). However, we had chosen a hotel right on an island in the middle of the city, Île de la Cité. This place stood out as amazingly cheap and amazingly well placed.
We walked over pont Neuf onto the island, then into place Dauphine, a quiet goregous little square at the western end of the island. Hôtel Henry IV shows its 250-year age well, being very run-down, creaky, smelly, yet with the two features we needed - cheap and central. Time Out magazine describes it as a "deluxe dive", and that's pretty apt really.
We hadn't booked, which was pretty brave, but it turned out that we could get ourselves a more expensive (and much better) room for one day, then a cheaper one for two more. Taken.
One of the virtues of being so amazingly central in a city such as Paris is that you have all this cool stuff about five minutes walk away. Just back across pont Neuf and a little west, we found our way into The Louvre.
We had heard so much about how long the queues were that we really hadn't intended to bother, but by some strange miracle the queue was really short and also, being a Sunday, it was cheap day also. We didn't need to be told twice, and quickly passed security, going down under the big glass pyramid into the reception area to grab a couple of tickets.
My plan was to go towards the Mona Lisa as fast as possible, get it out of the way and then go on from there. But this proved a little more challenging than first planned, so we went via quite a few other places, enjoying pretty much everything we saw.
The Mona Lisa itself was surrounded by six security guards and of course behind bullet-proof glass. We were urged to keep moving, giving us about thirty seconds to look at it before being moved on along the one-way traffic system. A bit sad, but I guess now we can say we saw it.
As we have mentioned before, we're no art buffs, so any art gallery inevitably becomes just a wander and work it out affair, going wherever takes our fancy. We saw plenty of Objets d'art, Antiquities, of course Paintings and some sculpture for good measure. The latter was best represented in Cour Marly, a large room which has been made to look like the park where all the sculpture in it used to reside. The natural lighting and space work well. Infact, the whole museum is suprisingly spaced out, nothing ever feels like they have tried to fit everything they possibly can out on display. Which is good, because we still didn't take most of it in.
I particularly liked a couple of pieces from around the place - the Eagle of Abbot Suger which is a shiny relic vase thing no doubt worth more than I'll ever earn and an amazingly ornate chess board, complete with little people under glass all around it in varying poses.
We had a break for lunch in nearby Jardin des Tuileries, where we found it amazingly cold - a theme to be repeated for most of our time in Paris. Sitting under a tree, we watched people go about their business in such a beautiful city, walking under the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel and through the park grounds. We would get back here more than once, being so handy.
By the end of it all, we were pretty tired from lack of sleep and really needed to go and sleep. It's a shame that the tickets aren't valid for two days or something, because we felt that we could have seen so much more, but that's the common problem with museums. Leaves something for next time anyway.
Back to the hotel for an afternoon nap (funny how we did that after we leave Spain and its famous Siestas!), after which we spent the night in, noting the beautiful place Dauphine out the window.

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