Croissants, Characters & Culture - Paris & Disney 2007 - Day 3 - Paris

[Mike]

Day 3 – Wednesday 30th May 2007


(Weather: promising start, sunny at first, then dull with rain on & off in Paris, and later at the Parks)

For two people who think 6am is a lie-in at home, Amanda and I are getting rather lazy this week! It’s after 7 before we wake, naturally, after another, cracking night’s sleep! Adam hears us moving around, preparing coffee, and soon joins us. I wake Bethany (a bit like poking a hibernating bear with a stick!) and the other three of us wander down to the kiosk to collect our breakfast goods.





We are served by the same, smiley girl as yesterday. There’s a notice posted on the wall, advising guests that they can’t use the resort village car park today, between 800am and 5pm, as it’s reserved for a private function. I find this a bit of a cheek, as if we did want to go swimming, or to the shops etc, we’d have a 1.5 mile round-trip walk! They really should address the parking issue here, and increase the size of the lot by at least 200%, or provide some form of shuttle bus (there’s obviously been one, or plans for such, as there are ‘bus’ shelters all over the place!

Beth is almost awake when we return, and we all enjoy our petit dejeuner of croissants, orange and French stick. We force Bethany to shower first, as she takes longest to get ready, with dire warnings about using all the water up, as we as yet have no way of knowing how limited the supply is… happily it doesn’t run cold even for the last (my) turn.

We sit outside while Beth finishes her rituals (Amanda is not a typecast female, who takes hours to get ready – she is a trained make-up artist and can shower, wash, dry & straighten her hair, do her make-up and dress inside 20 minutes, even for a posh do! ) I find the Camp on my sat nav and programme it in, so we shouldn’t get lost from now on! It’s 9.10 when we drive away for the Disney area… we intend to park at the Village and take the train into the city.

Parked up in Row A4 (close to the front) by 9.25, we walk to the station. It’s busy, with plenty of guests heading towards the two parks for opening time at 10.00am. The weather today is cool again, with broken cloud cover, although the cloud seems to be winning the battle!

There are self-service machines in the station, but the line at the ticket desks is short and we buy 4 returns to Les Halles, the nearest main-line station to Notre Dame and the Pompidou Centre. They cost 49.20Euro. We descend to the Paris bound platform, and a train is already waiting, so we board, and are under way 5 minutes later, around 9.40.

The journey is smooth and incident free, taking about 40 minutes. The scenery is very much how I imagine ‘urban-French’ to be, with distinctive houses and apartment blocks along the way – it’s also clear that the French have similar graffiti issues to other European cities we’ve visited recently!

The station of Chateau Les Halles is vast! An underground labyrinth on several levels, and it takes us 10 minutes to find an exit and leave! We’re not absolutely sure of our bearings when we eventually emerge onto the pavement, but we strike out in a promising direction and find ourselves walking alongside the street level gardens of Les Halles shopping complex, an underground development of stores, cafes and offices. (My Rough Guide advises that this centre has never been popular with Parisians and may be earmarked for redevelopment in the near future.)







We descend briefly into the place looking for a toilet – there’s a fairly attractive, sunken garden in the middle, and there are some pretty weird, full-size ‘Moulin Rouge’ mannequins dotted around the malls!



We can see the Pompidou Centre ahead and walk towards it.



The approach takes us past a pleasant plaza with an imposing, central fountain,



…and, joy, past a Starbucks! There’ll be at least one decent cup of Joe today!



Centre Georges Pompidou is a striking building, commissioned by the then Prime Minister in the 1970s. Although best known for the Musee National d’Art Moderne (I’m sure you can translate this for yourself!) it also houses a vast public library and a centre for music research. The building itself is now widely accepted as a work of art, although it received mixed reviews at first. Designed by a team of architects and structural engineers from Italy, Britain and Ireland, it seems to be almost inside out, with the structural skeleton and brightly coloured service tubes left exposed.

[Mike]

We like it! There’s a vast, virtually empty plaza sloping down to the entrance, where a queue has formed for the Museum’s opening at 11.00am. Around the edge sprout large, ship-like funnels – strangely reminiscent of the Telly-Tubbies kids’ programme!



Although we’d like to see the modern art museum within, today’s visit is a basic sightseeing affair and we have a couple more iconic institutions to find in the surrounding area. We head south, towards and across the River Seine, onto the larger of the two ‘Iles’, the Ile de la Cite.





(Along the way we note that driving in Paris is considerably slower than walking!)

There are several important and historic buildings on the island, which was in effect the whole of the fortified, mediaeval city! Our destination is perhaps the most famous, at least outside France, the ancient cathedral of Notre Dame.



Constructed between 1163 and 1345, Notre Dame is considered to be one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture. Set behind a large open plaza, it is certainly impressive and we eagerly head towards the main entrance. Admission is free, and so we are unsurprised by the lengthy queue at the doors. However, and pleasingly, the line moves swiftly and we are inside within 10 minutes.



I love cathedrals and monasteries. There’s a breathtaking quality about the better ones, and Notre Dame is high up the list. I am awed by the thought that you can touch the individual chisel marks made by a mason, hundreds, sometimes almost a thousand years ago. And when you consider that construction took decades or centuries, with primitive tools and machines by today’s standards, sometimes spanning several wars, it’s a constant amazement that they ever got built at all, let alone survive for so long!

The interior is initially very dark, as our eyes adjust to lower levels of illumination. And, although teeming with people, there’s a respectful quiet, which creates the impression that far fewer are present. We can hear beautiful choral singing up ahead and walk towards the central part of the nave.

It’s very much a ‘working’ church – there’s a mass going on in one of the beautiful side chapels, and in the centre of the building, under the crossing, the lovely singing emanates from a large, ladies choir. (That’s a choir with a large number of ladies, not a choir of large ladies!)



You can walk all the way round the interior, behind the altar, passing the side chapels



and a superb, scale model of the cathedral.



We make our way clockwise back to the opposite side, where we stand and listen to the fabulous singing, before leaving the church at 11.40. It’s drizzling a little now. As we head east, to get a look at the back of the building, we notice a large, damp line of people waiting for access to the tower, through an outside door. Notices indicate that only a limited number are allowed in every 10 minutes or so, suggesting that the back of the queue will b soaked before they reach the door in an hour or so.

There’s a small, woody garden behind Notre Dame, where we take refuge on a bench beneath the shelter of overhanging trees. The rear elevation is equally impressive to the more often viewed front, the former having beautiful, flying buttresses.



Next on our hit list is the Louvre complex, ľ mile or so west. We cross back onto the north bank, and, rather than walk down the busy, riverside boulevard, we walk ‘inland’ for a block to the front of the Hotel de Ville, a huge, Renaissance-style mansion, re-built in 1882 and the seat of Paris’s government.

[Mike]

Facing the building is the Rue de Rivoli, a busy thoroughfare leading west to the Louvre complex. We stroll the short distance in 15 minutes or so, and have just entered the walls of the rear courtyard when Adam decides he needs the loo, not the Louvre! A quick search of the nearby courtyards suggests there are no toilets in the vicinity, so we exit, cross over the Rivoli and head into the more commercial streets of shops, cafes and offices. We pass an unusual building, at first sight, covered in scaffolding, but actually clad in a decorative, steel grill & mesh.



It takes a little while to find a functioning facility – there are many, pod-like, self-cleaning and unisex toilets dotted around the streets, but not all are in working order.



Eventually we are lucky, and a much-relieved Adam gets his smile back. Checking the map, we realise that we are not very far from the Pompidou again, so we make for the Starbucks we spotted earlier. I know, I know – we’re in a city with probably more, good quality cafés and restaurants per square mile than anywhere we’ve ever been, and we go to an American coffee shop! Hey, we have kids who are fussy eaters, and we like the coffee, so that’s decision made!

We pass around the northern edge of Les Halles, across a plaza with this incredible sculpture:



The ordering process goes pretty well, I think, in French, until the drinks arrive and Adam has received a strawberry, iced- tea drink instead of the creamy frapuccino he wanted, but he likes it, so we don’t tell him about tea! We also buy 3 sandwiches and a salad for Beth. There’s a decent snug area to the rear of the shop where we enjoy our lunch and let our (usually non-walking) kids recharge their batteries.



It’s 130 now. We take a different route back to the Louvre, heading along Rue Etienne Marcel and Rue Des Petits Champs, to the Place Des Victoires.







I have to pause occasionally to pull Amanda away from certain distractions!



The buildings are varied and many of them lovely – a doorway leads into a discreet, Victorian arcade, which we explore.

[Mike]

The architecture changes often, with modern steel and glass blending happily with the traditional structures.



Our plan is to join the Rue de Rivoli beyond the Louvre, and approach it through the extensive gardens to its west side, the Jardins des Tuilleries. We reach the Rivoli halfway along the gardens, so head further west along it, under the cover of a lovely arcade protecting the entrances of designer shops and posh hotels.



For anyone unfamiliar with the geography, the Louvre sits at the east end of a long avenue (the Champs-Elysees) starting at Place Charles de Gaulle, better known as Place de l’Etoile (‘place of the star’, due to the many grand avenues radiating from it), where the second most famous, Parisian landmark, the Arc de Triomphe stands. The Champs-Elysees runs down from the Arc to the Place de la Concorde (at the edge of the Jardins des Tuilleries,) a historically bloody place where over 1000 people were executed by guillotine during the Revolution! An ancient Egyptian obelisk now marks the spot.



We had intended to walk all the way to the Concorde, to see the obelisk and then turn, through the gardens to the Louvre, but the rain is a little heavier and we enter the Jardins before it and head along the wide, gravelled avenue to the famous gallery.



There is a ‘mini’ Arc de Triomphe (the Arc du Carrousel) at the Louvre end of the park, aligned with the obelisk and its larger counterpart in the distance.





The rain comes and goes, and so our photographs are a little dull, I’m afraid, but I hope you get an idea of the scale of this magnificent, 16th century, former palace. The controversial glass pyramids, added in 1989, do, in my humble and uneducated opinion, enhance and not detract, from this landscape.

[Mike]

This is another walk-by only – if we tried to drag the kids into an art gallery after half a day’s walking, I think we’d have another Revolution, and probably as bloody! We take more photos and, knowing we’ll be back some time, sans enfants, we make our way back to Les Halles for around 3pm. After another restroom stop, we descend with no little trepidation into the labyrinthine bowels of the Metro, but find our boarding platform without any trouble. Even visitors without a modicum of French language should be able to find their way by place names and line colours. The train arrives in 10 minutes and we board the crowded carriage, initially having to stand for a while until we are past the city suburbs and most people have departed.



We discussed whether to get off a stop early at La Vallee shopping and dining complex to find a nice place for tea, but as it’s Extra Magic Hour tonight, we decide to continue all the way to the Disney Village and have a drink first. It’s 350 as we leave the station and walk into the shops and bars.

It looks like it might rain again, so we sit outside the Sports Bar in the vast, brightly covered area between the pub and the adjacent Disney Store.





We spend a pleasant 30-40 minutes, resting and chatting and enjoying a drink, before having a quick look in the Disney store (Adam’s looking for a gift for his mum) and checking out the dining options in the Village.

Nothing grabs us, and we (naively, as it turns out!) assume we can find something in the Disneyland Park. We stroll over, enter the Park, and obtain our EMH wristbands from beneath Main Street Station.

Walking on, we try to find tea. Everywhere we try seems to be shut, even though the park is busy and open until late tonight!



Frustrated, we end up with Hobson’s Choice and settle for the Au Chalet de la Marionette in Fantasyland. The lines are modest, even though only one Cast Member is taking orders, and we are soon waiting for our food. And waiting. And waiting. An English family in front of us query absolutely everything on their order, and we have the slowest CM ever trying to sort it out. She disappears for, and I do not exaggerate, five minutes looking for cream for them! Literally 25 minutes after entering the virtually empty café we receive our food and stomp outside to eat.

It starts to rain again as we finish. We walk into Frontierland to see if we can blag our way onto Big Thunder Mountain using yesterday’s FastPasses. Yep! No problem! We bypass the 40 minute, stand-by line and are riding within 5.

It’s a belter, better than the much older, Magic Kingdom version in Florida.




The rain is heavier now, and the crowds are thinning rapidly. Pirates of the Caribbean beckons, and we walk on to a virtually empty attraction for another, fun cruise… except Adam, who waits outside in the drizzle!



To cheer him up, we drip our way over to Fantasyland and ride the T Cups again – twice!



We note that the CMs are checking wristbands now, as it’s after 7pm. (normal closing time for non-Disney residents).All laughing, and not a little dizzy, I steer the family over to It’s a Small World, Amanda’s least favourite ride in Florida, but, to her extreme pleasure, it’s closed!



We take the ‘back alley’ route into Discoveryland, where only Buzz (35 minutes) and Space Mountain are operating. Amanda and I enjoy a walk-on ride on SM, before we decide to call it a day. It’s 7.45. We browse the (incredibly busy) shops along Main Street (so that’s where everyone went! And, cynically, why so few rides and restaurants are open, maybe?) as Adam continues his search for a Mickey Hoody, (Medium) without success.

At 830 we are all a bit weary, but in good spirits – we’ve covered a lot of ground today, even if the Park elements were a little frustrating – and we set off back to the car. The 5 mile journey 'home' to DCR takes the regulation 10 minutes. We do a bit of housekeeping (charge camera and phone batteries, wash and tidy up) before settling down for a coffee (our own Starbucks blend, from home) and a chat.

The kids ring their mum to say goodnight and are off to bed without a grumble at 10pm. We manage to stay awake another half-hour and then turn in.


Mike & Amanda

Tomorrow: Disney Studios and La Vallee shops & restaurants.

[fintywalker]

fantastic photo's thanks sooooo much, I lived in Paris for 10 months in 1991 I lived in the 11th arrondissment very near Pere Lachaise cemetary (where Oscar Wilde is buried). The photo's of the pompidou centre and the Louvre take me back, there used to be lots of ferral cats living near the Louvre.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by fintywalker

The photo's of the pompidou centre and the Louvre take me back, there used to be lots of ferral cats living near the Louvre.

See more...

.. we're quite 'catty' but didn't see any.. I suspect they've sanitised the area now.

[Guest]

Another good day. Great report and photos

[Guest]

again another great day, nice to see someone else enjoying what outside the parks have to offer

[Guest]

Another busy day

Great pics, espec the one of Amanda laughing with the kids...