If there is anything that can’t be solved by a bottle of wine, a baguette, and some camembert, then that thing is not in Paris. We spent a few days in Paris doing exactly that, mowing down baguettes on the banks of the Seine, however we managed to get some some actual touring in too as well as see some dear old friends of ours, that we met on World Tour #1 back in 2009, while they were vacationing in Paris.
This is my ‘after wine and baguette’ face, it is a lovely mix of drunken carbs and looking suspicious. All od the meals we are in Paris were exceptional from grocery store picnics, to an allegedly rat infested restaurant with our friends, (I mean their 6 yr old said he saw a rat, but whatever it was delicious), to our unique dining experience at Dans le Noir which is a ‘blind’ restaurant. Meaning you eat completely in the dark, you have blind waiters, and you have no idea what you are actually eating, unless you can use your tongue to identify it. Laura loved licking the plate with no one actually witnessing it, and obviously I don’t have any photo evidence of this either.
Anyway onto Notre Dame…
The cathedral is quite beautiful albeit still in stages of construction since that fire in 2019 from that deranged man who tried to burn the church down. The inside looks like it was especially scrubbed clean from smoke damage, but also from the wear and tear from 800 years of candle wax, splashes of baptismal waters, the tears from weddings and funerals, and the bitter disappointment of prayers when left unfulfilled. As Jesus has washed our sins, so has Notre Dame been left cleansed through a baptismal by fire, only to be made resplendent again and bathed in the love of Parisians. This refreshment may also have something to do with the upcoming visit of Pope Leo XIV this September.
After we hopped over to Shakespeare and Company Book store, a bookstore that books should be written about, if they haven’t been already. It is what I imagine the Cemetery of Forgotten Books looks like (in the Shadow of the Wind anthology), crossed with the Hogwarts Library. It was the old haunts of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T.S.Eliot, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many many others. It is the kind of shop that makes you want to write, drink brandy, smoke cigars, become argumentative, and then take up pugilism in your spare time. You know if it wasn’t so thick with tourists such as yourself, but if you squint, you can see that future of being a writer…which is really just you romanticizing the past. But if you can’t fantasize about yourself chasing some pursuit in Paris, I don’t think you can say that you have properly visited this city. I actually snuck this photo, as there are no cameras allowed in the shop (likely due to everyone wanting to use the site to be influencers).
Paris also included a mandatory stop at the Eiffel Tower, this is the first time Mike and I have ever been up it actually. Ironically the viewes from Level 2 were actually much better than at the top. But we easily spent an hour or two looking out at all of Paris. Some of the smaller sights we hit up were the Society National Bank, which had an exceptionally impressive interior, superior to Gallery Lafayette, which we also visited.
We spent our final day in splendour at the Versailles Palace. Louis the XIV (the sun king) was a prolific builder of this estate as apparently the old palace (the Louvre) was getting to be a pretty stuffy palace full of ‘heavens save us’ PARISIANS…some of whom were ugh…POOR. Like what a total and complete bummer, way to harsh the royal mellow. So off to the country for opulence, splendor, and a party scene that has never been rivalled before or after. Frankly if there is anything more impressive than the palace, it is the gardens with its 80 hectares of manicured perfection; it takes an army of 45 gardeners to maintain the place. Laura described the garden as being inside of a painting and she was exactly right.
A bientot a Paris, we will see you again in a few weeks, for now we are grabbing a car and doing a road trip across Western Europe.
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