Paris part un: Touring around the City

After Rouen, our next stop was the capital, Paris, where we had booked 5 nights at another cheap hotel.
Paris’ Metro (underground trains) was our main form of transport around the city. The trains and stations were pretty similar to London’s Underground, except they felt a bit more dim and dirty on average.
We took a metric tonne of photos while in Paris and Versailles (128 in total). You can check out the Paris photos here, and the Versailles photos here.

We arrived in Paris without a detailed map and without knowing how to get to our hotel. We tried to get to the central Office de Tourism, but we ended up outside the Louvre instead, tired, confused, and with two heavy backpacks. We eventually figured out that we must have walked right by it, retraced our steps and wallah! There it was. We received detailed maps of the city, some brochures and directions to our hotel from the friendly French woman behind the desk.
Our hotel was located in Montmartre, a seedy part of the city, not too far from Pigalle (the red light district). The streets were busy when we arrived; we still managed to find the place OK though. We spent the last part of the day by checking out the nearby Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. We found it busy at the Basilique because the pope had visited earlier that day.

The next morning we started our daily ritual of stumbling across a bakery for breakfast and ordering a croissant, a pain au chocolate and an espresso each. We ate our breakfast that morning next to the Arc de Triomphe, a huge memorial to Napoleons victories, which is situated in the middle of the largest roundabout in the world. While we sat there, we saw a few tourists gamble with their lives by attempting to cross to the centre of the busy roundabout while there was a pedestrian subway to the centre only metres away from where they crossed.
After checking out the Arc de Triomphe, we strolled down the Avenue des Champs Elysees which had a lot of expensive shops, over the Pont Alexandre III (bridge) and into the Hotel National des Invalides, a large Napoleonic building housing a couple of Army Museums, a small cathedral, and an expensive domed church housing the tomb of Napoleon I.
We then moved on to the Place de la Concorde (square), the Jardin des Tuileries (garden), and the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel.
After all that, we deserved a bit of a sit down, so we got on a tourist boat cruise down the Seine. We saw many of the Parisian buildings from the river including the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower and a mini version of the Statue of Liberty.

We got up early to try to beat the tourist rush to the Eiffel Tower the next morning. We got there a little bit before it opened, but the queues were still long. Still, it didn’t take too long to get on the elevator up. We went right up to the top platform, and the views were fantastic. We took too many photos, and made our way back down, using the stairs for part of the way. At the bottom we walked through the Champ de Mars gardens, then made our way to our next landmark, the Panthéon.
The Panthéon was originally built as a church, but is now a bastion of French nationalism. It houses within its huge elaborate interior many French sculptures, wall hangings, and the Foucault pendulum that tells the time based on the rotation of the earth. Its crypt is also home to the bodies of many notable French cultural heroes, such as Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Pierre and Marie Curie.
After leaving the Panthéon, we headed back toward the river for the Île de la Cité, an island in the Seine and the centre of Paris. It is also home to our next destination, the Notre Dame Cathedral. Despite the Cathedral being packed full of tourists, we still managed to find the Gothic cathedral quite serene.

To be continued in part deux…

The Channel, Dieppe and Rouen

We enjoyed the North of France where we got our first taste of holidaying in a non-English speaking country. It was a bit tougher than we thought it would be, but we had learnt a bit of French along with some key phrases that got us by OK. Despite what the English say, we found that on average, the French are a pretty friendly and reasonable bunch of people. We also found while in France that the majority of English speaking tourists (mainly Americans) were rude, unfriendly and unreasonable toward the French.
We took some photos; first, when we took a ferry over to Dieppe (photos here), then when we headed down to Rouen (photos here).

We headed over to mainland Europe by ferry after staying with my lovely Aunt Eileen in Brighton. Eileen was great to us and even dropped us off at the ferry terminal in the next town. Luckily for us, we chose to take the ferry over to France instead of the Eurostar (Channel Tunnel train). The day before we left, the Eurostar trains were cancelled because there was a big fire inside the Channel Tunnel closing the service. This of course meant that the ferry was packed full of Eurostar customers, which resulted in the ferry leaving over 2 hours late.
We eventually arrived in Dieppe after the 4 hour ferry ride by which time it was late afternoon. Dieppe looked a bit small and unexciting, so we jumped on the first train to Rouen, about 45 minutes south of Dieppe.

We enjoyed our stay in Rouen. It is a medium sized city with a rich history dating right back to the Gauls who founded the city, through to the Romans, and the Normans who had the city as it’s capital. It was also pointed out numerous times that Rouen is where the French heroine, Joan of Arc, was burned at the stake by the English invaders during the Hundred Years’ War.
We got to the local Office de Tourisme just before it closed, and managed to find a cheap and tiny but central hotel nearby. They didn’t speak hardly any English, but we got by with a few words of French and hand gestures.
We toured around Rouen the next morning and saw the impressively tall Rouen Cathedral, the smaller Church of St. Maclou, the weird astronomical clock: Gros Horloge, the modern Church of Saint Joan of Arc, and took a stroll along the banks of the Siene.

We were keen to get to Paris by then, so took a train off to the capital that afternoon after grabbing a couple of baguettes at a stall outside the Rouen SNCF railway station.