Day 37 - October 7 - Paris
This was the first Sunday of the month and museums are free. So I thought we would get up early and head to the L'Orangerie for the 9:30 am opening. We got out and about around that time - wow so quiet and less crowded that time of day. Well,we walked to the L'Orangerie and the opening times had changed for individuals - we could not get in until 12:30 pm. So we decided to go ahead with Plan B which was take the metro to the Marais (3-4th arrondissment) and stroll that area.
Purchased a carnet of tickets (10 for 11.20 euros) in the metro (noticed it's not as crowded as London metro) and rode to Le Marais. It was still cool and quiet outside, the shops had not opened up yet. We went to a cafe and had croissants and chocolate chaud (hot chocolate) for $12 - ouch!
We finished our breakfast and started our stroll. We walked to the famous Place des Vosges. We encountered many homeless people along the street and actually sleeping in the Place des Vosges with their limited belongings and some even had dogs with them. They use the public toilets that are set up around the city.
We continued walking to Rue St. Antoine, over and up Rue Rivoli to Hotel De Ville, then up to Bourg-Tibourg Place where we had lunch at Cavalier Blue - chicken and pomme frites for me and croque monsieur and pomme frites for David. After lunch, we walked to a crepe cart and I had my first taste of Parisienne crepes! Banana and nutella - yum!
After filling ourselves we walked to the Pompidou, down Rue Rambuteau to Forum les Halles. At this point, we decided to go ahead and walk the rest of the way to the Louvre area where the L'Orangerie was located. We took Rue Louvre through the arches and into courtyard past the pyramids. It was quite crowded by now. We got to Orangerie- not much of line to get in considering it was free. Well I'm glad we didn't pay, the first room was Monet's Lily paintings which were nice, but then there was a downstairs room with a handful of paintings - neither one of us liked that much. We were in and out in about 40 minutes.
We walked back on a different street and saw some barricades so decided to cross and walk on the other side. We noticed a large building with gates and fencing, and suddenly a uniformed guard runs out, shaking his finger at us as if we were naughty children! Apparently we were not allowed to walk on that side of the street so we crossed back over and found the sidewalk behind the barricades. We noticed quite a few SWAT-style vans parked along the street and a couple of police officers. When we got back to the apartment, I looked on the map and realized we had walked on Avenue Gabriel in front of the US Embassy and other government buildings - No wonder there were so many guards!
We hung out in our apartment sipping French beer and snacking on, dare I say it, tortilla chips and hot sauce. Ok so we missed a few things in Texas- we couldn't believe we found those in the Monoprix and we just had to have chips and salsa- it had been almost 6 weeks without some kind of Mexican food!! Don't give us hard time!
Went to bed around 10:30 pm- walking sure does tire you out!
