Spring Break, continued

Oh, hello again. I'm back. I should be studying for my midterms (which are coming up this week), but I know I'm gonna procrastinate and I figure that procrastination by blogging is slightly more productive than procrastinating by creeping around on facebook, so here I am.

Let's see, where did I leave off? Okay. Here we go.

Day Nine: samedi le 24 avril (Saturday, 24 April)
Actually woke up in time to take advantage of the hotel's complimentary breakfast! (It was nothing special, but for 60 € a night for one person, one has to take advantage of all the freebies one can, am I right? I also took super-long showers and stole all the complimentary toiletries. But then again, I do that everywhere.) Anyway, having eaten my bread and cheese and croissant and jam and downed my double-tall shot glass of OJ, I was ready to go explore the city some more. The night before, I had written out a plan for sight-seeing, including the names of places, the nearest metro stops, and the metro lines the stops were on. I was Miss Organized Tourist 2010. And I started the day by heading toward Sacre Coeur, known in English as Sacred Heart Basilica, up on the top of the hill. I just kind of started walking after I left the hotel, and the red light district (located uphill of the hotel) quickly faded away into quiet cobblestone streets lined with tall, faded buildings, a lot of which appeared to be residential the higher up I got. I climbed a set of steep stairs, huffing and puffing and sweating by this time, and continued my climb uphill. I wasn't really sure if I was even going in the right direction at this point, but it was a nice walk and I didn't want to whip out my Tourist Beacon (map), so I just kept going. As long as I'm headed uphill, I figured, I can't really go wrong. And for once, I was right:

Sacre Coeur: it's gotta be one of the more unique architectural landmarks in Paris.

The basilica sits up on top of a huge hill overlooking the city (maybe you remember it off in the distance in that picture from the previous entry). The view is ridiculous: the entire city stretched out before me, fading into the humid morning haze:

Just another thing I climbed to the top of in Paris. No big.

I can only imagine what the view must be like on a really clear day. Amazing. And a little dizzying.

I went inside the basilica but you aren't allowed to take pictures inside. (You're also supposed to be respectfully dressed - aka no shoulders, ladies - but I definitely saw a woman wearing a tube dress in there. And I don't wanna sound mean, but this woman should not have been wearing a tube dress anywhere - the beach, the pool, whatever - let alone in a church. Still not as bizarre as the strapless prom dress-wearing lady I saw at Notre Dame, though.) Anyway, I bought a couple postcards, one of which showed the inside of the church, and then headed back down the hill by the more traveled, more touristy way (avoiding all the people asking me to sign petitions, take surveys, buy light-up paperweights of the Eiffel Tower, etc.). This particular route deposited me smack dab in the middle of a bunch of cheap souvenir shops. You know what I'm talking about - they're all selling keychains, postcards, baseball caps, and the same four shot glasses. But I gave in to the urge and did a little shopping, buying some souvenirs for myself, some postcards to send home, and a little present for Tracey. After I made it back down the hill, I exchanged my travelers' checks and rewarded myself by buying a really cute minidress/long top and some cute flats at a cheap-y, hole-in-the-wall store. (Shoes = 4,95 €. Dress = 10 €. Me = ecstatic.)

Shopping bags in hand, I continued around Montmartre - it's very pretty (and peaceful once you get off the tourist-y streets), with a lot of art galleries (as it is known as the artists' neighborhood of Paris) and, for some reason, a lot of cloth and textile ("tissu") stores. But I was on a mission: I wanted to find Amélie's café (from the movie). The film itself takes place in Paris, particularly Montmartre, where the title character lives. (In fact, one of the film's international titles is "Amélie of Montmartre.") The café Amélie works at, I'd discovered during my hotel research, is actually a real place, and I was determined to find it. The only problem was that I had no real idea where it was (only that it was somewhat near Rue Aristide Bruant), no real recollection of the name (something about windmills, maybe?), and only the foggiest recollection of what it looked like. (Unfortunately, half the cafés in Paris could fit my "foggy recollection.") Nevertheless, I was intent on finding this place, despite the fact that I had little idea what I was actually looking for and my map didn't include Rue Aristide Bruant.

My first break came in Place des Abbesses, where I found a posted map that included the road I was looking for - and it was only a couple blocks down! I set off, wandered back up the hill, found a windmill (Montmartre used to be covered with them - read all about it here), and in short had a very pleasant walk along some beautiful streets - but no trace of Amélie or her café.

Whooooosh.

All the streets not running "parallel" to the hill are steep and some are killer to climb.

I did, however, stumble across an SNCF boutique. Perfect, since I needed to get a refund on my return ticket from Milan (since I didn't ever make it to Italy) and get my ticket back to Lyon printed out for me. I waited in line for probably over half an hour (boring) and finally got everything taken care of. By this time it was around noon and I said to myself, "You'd better get going if you wanna do anything else in the city today. Just drop your stuff off at the hotel and take the metro over to the Eiffel Tower. You'll be mad at yourself if you spend the whole day looking for a café you may or may not have unwittingly seen already" (and I'd been taking pictures of all of them, just in case). I begrudgingly admitted to myself that this was good advice, and started wandering back in the general direction of the hotel. And there it was. No, not the hotel, you doof. The café!!! It was called Café des 2 Moulins, "The Two Windmills," because it's located between the Moulin Rouge and the windmill at the top of the hill. I recognized the name, but what's more is I recognized the big honkin' picture of Audrey Tautou on the back wall of the restaurant. What luck! I thought, and proceeded to take a million (or, okay, three) pictures:

Amélie's café!

So I returned to the hotel (after a brief detour to McDonald's to use the free wifi) feeling good. I dropped off my stuff and then headed to the Eiffel Tower. I got off not right at the tower but at a stop that was slightly further away (it was easier than transferring metro lines) and kind of blindly felt out my way toward the tower. I finally found it and approached it from the side with a very nice little park with koi ponds, etc. As I stood there, staring mesmerized at the fish, I got a text from my friend Nayab saying that a group of my friends had just returned from Prague and were in the city. I called her back to plan a time to meet, talked to Jake, and he agreed that they'd text or call me when they'd figured out their plans. I therefore figured I had some time, and I got in line to go up the Eiffel Tower - all stairs, baby, no elevators for me. Sure the stairs only take you up to the second landing (not the very top), but the student ticket was 3,50 € (as opposed to 11,50 € to go all the way up in the elevator). I steeled myself for a long walk and headed up. I made it to the first landing, took a crapload of pictures, and then headed up to the second landing, where I took another bunch of pictures of all the same stuff, only higher. Here's a sampling:

Let's play "spot the Arc de Triomphe"...

Keep in mind how this picture makes it look like you're close to the top...later you'll see that you're really not even halfway up.

Having had my fill of Eiffel Tower tourist-related hijinks, including, but not limited to: buying overpriced postcards (0,50 € each?!), counting the steps all the way down to the ground from the second landing (692), and listening to an American tourist make a failed attempt to thank a French security guard in his native language ("Gracias!"), I got in touch with the rest of the group (whilst fending off the million and one guys standing around trying to sell me yet another light-up Eiffel Tower paperweight) and found out that they were getting falafel, apparently at a restaurant called only "Falafel." I headed off in search of a metro station. Somehow I managed to get myself lost while doing this (despite the fact that there is a metro station at the Eiffel Tower - although it's really not the most convenient line for getting where I needed to go). As I was wondering around Paris, hot and sweaty and starting to get hungry, I got another text telling me that the restaurant was closed and that instead I should just text the group when I got off at the St. Paul metro stop. Okay. I found a metro, got on, transferred, rode to St. Paul, and was just about to send off a text when the group spotted me (thus saving me 20 Eurocents). We checked out St. Paul's cathedral and then went to Notre Dame (my second time, but the first time for some of the others). We walked up by the Pantheon again and then got Indian food for dinner, immediately after which we found a crêpe stand and bought crêpes (natch). It was starting to get dark, so we went back toward the Eiffel Tower to see it all lit up at night. Kelly and Nayab were absolutely enthralled. It was adorable. =)

We had a lot of fun taking pictures in front of the tower (Amanda and I took a bunch of pictures of us throwing the Kappa Delta sign, since I'm short and the sign actually covered my face in some of the pictures...booooo), and we got a fellow tourist to take a picture of all of us (he was super-nice), although the pictures didn't come out so great in the dark:

You can tell it's actually us and not just a random group of people because you can see me off on the right, being all short and whatnot.

La Tour Eiffel at night.

We explored the base of the tower a bit and briefly considered going up, but in the end we decided to just go grab a spot on the lawn to watch the tower sparkle, which it does every hour on the hour for a couple minutes. It was very nice. I believe we sang some Disney songs and Kelly and I split a bar of dark chocolate with quinoa in it. (It tasted like a super-delicious Crunch Bar.) And then the tower started to sparkle and there was a collective "oooh" from the crowd:

Ooh, that's right. It's a video. We're gettin' all high-tech up in here.

Believe me, the video does not come close to doing it justice. It's really pretty when it's all sparkly like that.

When the tower finished doing its thing, we went back to the metro station and took it to Pigalle so that I wouldn't have to walk in or near the red-light district by myself to get back to the hotel. (Kelly kindly offered to get me a discounted room at the Marriot with them, which would have been super-fun, but I'd already reserved three nights at my hotel so it would have been a waste of money. I was a little bummed to miss out on bonding time, so I took an extra-long, extra-hot shower to console myself, and then finished my book. Lovely.)

Anyway, people were also interested in seeing the Moulin Rouge, and I wanted to see it at night myself (something I would not have been able to do on my own). Since there were five of us (and we had a guy to protect us, haha), we braved the red-light district and made it to the Moulin Rouge, which looked all classic and whatnot lit up at night:

The (in)famous Moulin Rouge at night

Then everyone walked me back to Pigalle, at which point I said I felt like I could do the rest of the walk on my own. It was only across the square and down a side-street, after all, and there were people out and about that would certainly hear my distressed screams should I feel the need to make any. We parted with strict instructions for me to text Nayab as soon as I got back to my hotel room. Okay. Done. I started walking, whistle in hand just in case. I crossed the square. There was a guy walking close behind me, not following me per se, but muttering to me (at me?) in French as I went. I ignored him and crossed the street. He remained on the other side. Whew. Walk, walk, walk. I ignored another guy as he shouted "Excusez-moi, mademoiselle! Excusez-moi!" at me from across the street. Then my walking buddy crossed back over and walked behind me some more, continuing to mumble. It was a little creepy, but by then I was only about one door down from my hotel and could see the lobby light spilling out into the street through the open door, so I wasn't so much afraid as just a little freaked out. I walked into the lobby without turning back, got my room key from the desk, and looked around. The guy was nowhere to be seen, on the sidewalk or otherwise. I went up to my room, texted Nayab, took the aforementioned extra-long shower, and went to bed.

Day Ten: dimanche le 25 avril (Sunday, 25 April)
Woke up and went down to breakfast, where the waitress remembered me from the morning before and brought me my orange juice without me having to ask. I texted the group and, after checking out, met up with Kelly, Amanda, and Nayab outside the Louvre. I sat with them as they ate breakfast on the lawn and then they headed in. Since I'd already seen the Louvre and only had until about 2 pm before I had to head off to the train station, I opted to stay outside, catching up on some reading for class, listening to music, and sunbathing. I headed to the train station around 2 pm, bought some lunch at Brioche Dorée (my favorite French food chain, hands down), accidently ran over my new shoes with my suitcase wheels, leaving ugly black marks on the cream colored canvas, did some French swearing over that, and then waited for my train. Once I got on, the trip passed pretty much without incident. I caught up on most of my school reading (if only I could say the same today), and read a few pages of Pride and Prejudice (I like to read it every spring and every summer...I'm a little behind on that this year.). Once I'd arrived back in Lyon I decided to make the 40 minute-hour long walk home rather than taking the metro, since a.) I'm frugal, and b.) it was a beautiful day, even hotter in Lyon than it had been in Paris. I got home, texted Jacques (my host brother) so I could get into the building (since I'd left the key at home to keep it from being stolen), avoided the hobo that sometimes hangs around outside, lugged my stuff up the stairs to the elevator (yes, you have to go up some stairs to get to the elevator. I don't really understand the logic of it, either), and then crashed in my room, exhausted but tan (yesssss!!!!!!!) and happy with my spring break (even if I still harbor resentment toward a certain island nation and its lava-spewing mountains).

And that's it, I think! Whew, it's almost 8 pm and I still haven't gotten any studying done today. I should probably go get on that. Or upload vacation pictures to facebook. One of the two. If I actually get anything constructive done, I can come back here and give a run-down of what's been going on since I got back (a dinner party, a football match, a karaoke bar, and Iron Man 2 all come into play), and then I'll be all caught up! =)

Ta!

One of my favorite pictures of the Eiffel Tower from this trip. But, yeah. Check out how far the second landing is from the top. Pretty far, right? Not nearly as close as it looked when I was actually ON the landing.