Notre Dame is on an island in the middle of the Seine and it takes a whopping five minutes to walk there from our hotel. Somehow we recovered from the brutal journey and checked the place out. Guess what? The rumors are true - there’s lots of gargoyles on Notre Dame. A lot of ancient people spent a lot of time and a lot of money to build this place. Today is a Sunday, so there’s a service going on inside. The house is packed. Tourists are ushered to sides of the cathedral, where we can gawk and admire the ancient artworks without disturbing the worshippers. Unless you call hundreds of tourists snapping pictures of the priests with bright flashbulbs disturbing. There’s little areas off the main chamber that contain tombs and sculptures. Pretty grim stuff – no fun in religion here!
There’s an option to go up to the roof, where we could have had a fun game of hunchback-grabs-the-lady, but instead we went back outside. A quick trip to the crypts revealed they were a smelly basement full of dead priests, so no thrill there. Not even an animatronic skeleton to liven things up. Stupid French, no sense of drama.
We took one of our 2 remaining tour bus routes in the morning. No big highlights except this cool photo from the National Library:
There only seem to be 3 kinds of dogs in France, and this is one of them. They’re all carbon copies of each other. Very creepy to always see the same kind of dog everywhere. You’d think the communists were behind it to prevent freedom of thought. And to keep Katie from screaming “Doggie!” every 5 seconds in a foreign country. No fun at all.
The bus returned us to Notre Dame. We walked across the river to the Left Bank, an area packed with warren-like alleys and lots of restaurants.
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We’re still sick of French food, so we picked Greek. Inside the restaurant they were playing a DVD of a Greek woman in her 40s singing at a dinner concert. The audience in the video seems comically torn between eating their food and jumping up to dance & sing. A tough choice, I’m sure! But you gotta love this place right away because there’s two cats strolling around the restaurant and if you’re nice, the kitties let you pet them. Yay!
The bad part is going to the bathroom. You have to go down a narrow stairway with an alcove on the side. There’s a statue in the alcove of a naked guy with a big uncircumcised penis and the stairs are so narrow that it’s in your face if you dare even glance in that direction. Maybe that plays well in Greece, but it tends to make us American tourists a little anxious. Luckily the two-button toilet calmed me down.
Wandering the neighborhood after lunch we saw this awesome car - THE INKY-DINKY MOBILE:
Katie took the picture while Jordan stood next to the car for scale. We were pretending that we weren’t taking a picture lest the dwarves inside became enraged and burst out to kill us with their magical +3 axes.
There was also a sign in McDonalds for their baffling new product:
What exactly is a Mythic Chicken? Perhaps it’s that legendary fowl which has been whispered of through the ages, a mighty uber-chicken that roams the French countryside, terrifying cornfields and small children. Apparently this horrifying beast has been captured by the great hunters at McDonalds, and has now been sliced into tiny pieces and deep-fried for your convenient eating pleasure. Thus does a legend die… for you, the fast-food consumer. You feel good about yourself now? PIG!
We got back on the bus for the last tour route. We got off at the Rodin Museum, which was highly recommended by many people, including Katie’s dad. And, oddly enough, it happened to be Father’s Day so how could we go wrong? It was pretty great. Makes you hate modern art even more when you see the great realism of the old masters.
Here’s a fun arty thing: group tours have a tradition of putting their admission stickers on the crosswalk lights just outside the museum.
All this touring around has made us sleepy!
Back home came the best news since we arrived in Paris! There was an available room in the hotel that was actually big enough for 2 people to live in! And it’s got a window overlooking the street - complete with FRENCH doors! HOLY CATS, CAN IT BE TRUE??? We raced to switch rooms, moving at a blinding speed. Here’s the awesome new room. Note that Jordan can no longer touch both sides of the room while lying on the bed!
Having a view and room to move around makes all the difference in the world! We immediately became more relaxed. Relaaaaaxed.
Katie took a nice long BATH because now she could. Ahh, relaxed. To celebrate, we dressed up all fancy-like and set out to find a funky place in our neighborhood (the Marais) for dinner. After much walking, we settled on a nice place on the Place de Voges.
Jordan had an astoundingly good chicken curry dish, and Katie took a culinary foray into some French duck dish. By the end of dinner, the Place was fenced in the night, so we walked around the perimeter of the square, looking into the windows of art galleries. Then we walked home. Nobody mugged us. It was good.
