Where We Manage To Mess Up Most Of The Day, But Have Good Conversations
It was nice not to be in a hurry Saturday morning. We took our time with everything. We knew we had our Eiffel Tower tickets at 3:00, but we were open to doing something in the morning. We decided to try to get into the Musee de l’Orangerie – mostly Impressionist artists, especially and particularly Monet’s “Water Lilies”.
Problem was, we had something already planned with tickets and everything. We just forgot all about it. We had bought tickets for the Sainte Chapelle church, very close to Notre Dame. BUT, I had bought the tickets from the church’s website, not Trip Advisor. Trip Advisor sends little nag-o-grams to remind you. The church does not.
Oblivious to our actual plans, we made our way to the Musee de l’Orangerie. Andy stood on the line to buy tickets, and I sat on a bench watching the people go by in the Place de la Concorde. Regardless what protests happen in the evening, in the day time it’s always business as usual.
Andy stood in that line quite some time. He had a great conversation with a young woman from Korea who will soon be moving to Fairfax, VA to be a nurse with iNOVA.
By now it was approaching 1:30 p.m. (90 minutes in that line!) and still not even close to buying tickets, much less entering the museum. And we had to be at a certain spot by 3:00 p.m. to meet the Viator tour person who would give us our Eiffel Tower tickets. And we hadn’t had lunch. We decided to give up.
We took an Uber to the meeting spot, which is also a cafe. We had a small lunch – we were done just sat the Viator person arrived.
It was a relatively short walk to the Tower entrance. And then the fun began.
Even with tickets, there was still a long line to go through security. There was no place for me to sit. A Tower employee saw me and allowed me to cut through 99% of the line. Woot! And then on the other side was ANOTHER line for the elevator. Still no place to sit, and the line moved very, very slowly.
As we finally reached the actual entrance and scanned our tickets, the entrance person mentioned that safety regulations require that you be physically able to walk down all the steps from the top in case the elevator stopped working. Which had happened just that week. A subtle hint that maybe I shouldn’t go to the very top. I pondered while we took the elevator to the 2nd level.
Not surprisingly, it was very windy and chilly up there. The views made up for it, of course.
We looked around for the elevator to the top and discovered that there was yet another full flight of stairs to climb to get to the level where the summit elevators were located. That’s when I decided to stay on the 2nd level – another flight of stairs up, go to the top, come down, a flight of stairs down, then a long wait to go all the way to the bottom and exit. Yeah, I’m good with the second level.
This is my favorite photo from the 2nd level – caught in a hot second when I saw other people hurrying to snap photos.
I sat back down on the bench to continue people watching. There was a man sitting to my left, but we weren’t paying any attention to each other. Then the man’s family appeared, including a guide dog. The man’s wife said to him, “You need to move over to the end, because he {the dog} is not happy with you so far away. He {the dog} insists on lying here in this spot and you have to sit where he can reach you.” So the man dutifully shifted over to the end of the bench, such that he was sitting directly over the dog. Then his wife and kids went off to take more photos of the view.
Out of the blue, the man starts talking to me – about how his family lives in Boise, ID, and the flight to Paris was atrocious (multiple stops), and his poor dog wasn’t happy, but they absolutely had to bring him….and that’s when I realized that the man was severely sight impaired.
And after that, we compared winters – Boise having a record cold winter with record snow levels vs. MD with a very warm winter and potentially record low snow falls, etc. And he and his family was familiar with the DC area – his father-in-law had lived there, and they had visited many times while the father-in-law was ill with cancer. {I didn’t dare ask if his father-in-law was still around…}
When his wife and kids came back, it was time for them to go. His wife asked me what the story was with tipping the bathroom attendant. I said I had absolutely no clue – the tipping rules in Europe are different than in the US, but every time we think we have it figured out, we’re wrong. We tend to like to err in favor of tipping somebody when we shouldn’t than risk insulting somebody that we didn’t tip.
With that, I shook hands with the guy, and off they went. Never found out their names, but it doesn’t matter.
Andy came back shortly after that, and we started our trek back down to the ground. Fortunately there were benches by the down elevator – I just shooed some teenagers away and took a seat.
Some views from the summit:
Once we were back on ground level, we couldn’t figure out the best way out.
Naturally we picked the exact wrong exit – diagonally across from where we *should* have exited to minimize the walk. But it was beautiful out as we strolled back towards the hotel. There was some kind of long distance race taking place in the city – we saw the lead runners go by. This explained the extra police presence and fences blocking off streets.
Back at the hotel we had a little time before meeting Susie and Janet for our evening dinner cruise. I was looking through my paperwork to find the voucher, when I saw the tickets for Sainte Chapelle. Good Grief. Luckily, it wasn’t a whole lot, and I bought the tickets directly from the church, so I considered it a donation.
Susie and Janet at a wonderful time at Versailles. Like most everything else in and around Paris, it’s been spiffed up and polished in preparation for the 2024 Summer Olympics.
Our dinner cruise was with the Bateaux Mouche company, not terribly far from the hotel. We grabbed a cab right outside the hotel. It should have been an 8 minute drive. It became obvious that the cabbie had made a mistake and didn’t know what he was doing, when he wanted to drop us off across a major street from the dock – with no crosswalk or any obviously safe place to cross. He drove around a little more, made a left turn, and pulled off to the side in the general area of the entrance. Once we got out of the cab it was very obvious that he had missed the entrance to the dock – we saw buses and cars pulling up right in front of the Bateaux Mouches entrance.
It was still not clear what we were supposed to do – the ticket didn’t provide clear instructions. So we kept showing our ticket to anybody who looked official, until someone waived us inside to the reception desk, where we picked up our boarding passes. Still more walking to go to find the correct boat.
There was live music – a pianist and a violinist. Just a bit too loud for our tastes, though the music was excellent.
We had a 4 course meal – all of it very good, especially for dinner cruise food.
Of course at some point I had to find the bathroom which was, of course, down a flight of stairs. The attendant offered to help me use the “stair chair” thing, but I can’t stand those. I just did my best with the stairs.
When I came up, I found the violinist bouncing around the dance floor to assorted typical Jewish celebration songs, including “Hava Nagilah”, with a crown of people bouncing around him. And just like that, it felt like we were at a bar mitzvah!
It was a very nice evening – a great way to end our time in Paris. It was now going on 11:00 p.m. and we had to figure out how to get ourselves back to the hotel.
We were fiddling with Uber, when a taxi van showed up in front of us. Woot! We grabbed it.
This van had a very high clearance off the ground – getting us, and in particular, me, into the van was a serious challenge. But we did it!
Little did we know we would be treated to the full “Paris cab driver” experience, with all sorts of crazy moves and fun language describing the other drivers. We felt lucky to arrive back at the hotel in one piece. I’m glad I wasn’t in the front seat.
Tomorrow: Onward to Lyon
Maryland Meshugas 