Paris

Our first full day in Paris began with a beautiful breakfast prepared by our lovely hostess, Genevieve. She is trying to help Jim improve his French so speaks in French as much as possible. Jim is doing very well. We spoke over breakfast for about an hour. Genevieve is so friendly and very knowledgeable. Unfortunately her husband Jean Paul had a stroke two months ago so we won't get to meet him. He is in a pretty bad way which is awful. Reading comments from past visitors makes us think he would have been a very interesting man to get to know. 

Due to our leisurely breakfast we had a late start to our sightseeing.

We activated our two day Paris pass by joining the hop on hop off bus at Notre Dame which is a short walk from our apartment. We stayed on for over an hour just looking at the city. We got off at the Eiffel Tower. 

The queue was crazy so we decided to leave it for another day and took a cruise on the Seine for an hour. A lot of seated sightseeing so far. 

The day had started off cool but by lunch time it was quite warm and the predicted rain was nowhere to be seen.

Not hungry due to the filling breakfast, we hopped back on the bus and headed to the Louvre.

Knowing we were crazy, we headed for the Mona Lisa. We had seen her before , but decided a visit would not be complete without looking at her again. What an amazing display of bad manners we experienced. People were absolutely desperate to get in close. People were pushing and shoving like they were trying to escape a life-threatening situation. Jim gave up. I almost got to the front but when a young girl offered me her front position I suggested she give it to the man beside me as he was so desperate ( I made sure he heard me, having also mentioned that if he stopped shoving me every time I tried to take a shot, I would move away more quickly).

Still fuzzy: I should have taken a photo of the front of a souvenir book or the black and white sign instead like other people did- strange behaviour! The craziest part was when I was trying to move away and the crazy woman behind me was physically pushing me. I told her I was leaving like her but she continued to push anyway. I could only laugh.

We wandered through other galleries without the crowds apart from coming across pockets of tour groups. 

Silly us for choosing the early afternoon to visit here.

The weather was now surprisingly warm. We have been soooo lucky with the weather for almost seven weeks- one drizzly day in Lake Como and the rest warm ( or extremely hot) and sunny.

We walked back towards our apartment and stopped for an early dinner at the restaurant on the corner, recommended by Genevieve. It was indeed a lovely meal accompanied by Champagne ( the real stuff of course). 

Back to the room for a little rest before venturing out into the night.

We wandered along the Seine, specifically headed for Saint Chappell. We expected to find this church lit up, as Genevieve raved about it at breakfast. We obviously got our wires crossed. We eventually found it- in the dark, in the centre of the police centre which used to be a palace. Not only wasn't it lit up, we couldn't even see it as all the gates were closed and you couldn't see through them. Oh, well, a visit during the day will be on our list.

The weather was still very mild out at 10 pm so when we got back, we had to sit on the terrace for a while to cool down. 

A lovely day with much more to pack in tomorrow.