I love Paris in the summer, when it drizzles

I write this sitting at our friends' computer in La Rochelle, because we didn't get a chance to go to an internet cafe in Paris. So I'll have to summarize a few days in this post, if I can manage to type it all, because some of the letters on French computers are in different places and it's throwing me off a bit!

In fact, the weather in Paris wasn't that bad, despite the title of this post. It rained a bit the first evening we were there, and it poured yesterday when we took the train to La Rochelle, but otherwise it was warmer than Amsterdam and partly cloudy. We spent three nights in Paris, but really only two days. On our first morning we went to visit Notre Dame, which was only a five minute walk from our hotel in Saint Germain, near the Latin Quarter. We saw the inside of Notre Dame but decided against climbing to the towers, because the wait on the line would be an hour and a half!

After lunch, we went to the Musée d'Orsay, mecca of Impressionism. I could live in that museum. The building is a former train station, so the architecture alone is beautiful. But the paintings are extraordinary! Renoir, Degas, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh...really, I could take up residence there and never get bored. We took a guided tour focused on the Impressionist paintings (the museum's collection goes from the 1840s until 1914) and the tour guide was great. She was very animated and enjoyed occasionally imitating the figures in the painting to help us better understand!

That evening we had a picnic dinner in front of the Eiffel Tower, and at dusk, took a boat ride down the Seine river to see the buildings all lit up. It was breathtakingly beautiful to see the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Place de la Concorde, and especially Notre Dame lit up at night. After the boat ride, we decided to walk back to our hotel instead of taking the metro, since we hadn't taken the metro to get to the Eiffel Tower, so it couldn't be that far the other way, right? WRONG. We left the Eiffel Tower around 11:15pm and got to our hotel just before 12:30am. Our legs were très très tired!

The next day we got a later start and took a picnic lunch to Montmartre, the former artist's colony of Paris, which is up on a hill and provides a beautiful view of the city. We also went inside the Basilisque du Sacre-Coeur, a neo-Byzantine style cathedral. We also passed Rue Gabrielle (Gabrielle Street) and took the requisite pictures there. Then we walked to the Moulin Rouge, again to take pictures, and took the metro to the Opèra Garnier, the famous opera house home to the Phantom and to Degas' ballerinas. We went inside the opera house, which really is exquisite, and saw a special exhibit called "Image(s) of Dance", featuring costumes, photos, paintings, and sculptures of the dancers of the opera house.

That night we went to dinner in the Latin Quarter, but first I got a single scoop of mango sorbet in a cone from a famous ice cream parlor on Île-St-Louis. It tasted like real mangos in a cone.

Yesterday morning, in the rain, we didn't wander far from our hotel before we went to the train station, because we don't have an umbrella and refuse to buy one just for the sake of having it, at an elevated price for tourists. We had lunch at a cafe nearby, and the lunch wasn't really worth remarking on, but the chocolat chaud (hot chocolate) was amazing. It was really dark chocolate, cocoa I guess it would be, with foam and more cocoa powder on the top. Mmmm...

So now I'm in La Rochelle, trying to make the best of my limited French skills. I learned a new phrase last night: Je pige que dalle! It's slang for Je ne comprends pas, meaning I don't understand. Comes in handy!

And look at that, I managed to write another essay, even on a foreign keyboard, typing at half the speed. Today we're going to be given the grand tour of La Rochelle by our friends...in mixed French and English I'm sure, which is the best way!

But we'll always have Paris.