Day 23 – Monday 13 June 2016

A lazy start this morning, no rush, no tours to catch. We didn’t finish breakfast until 9am before heading out on a stroll around the streets of Paris by ourselves. We could take our time, so we wandered slowly towards the Louvre Museum, crossing over the Seine River on a foot bridge full of modern sculptures. The Louvre was in front of us, a grand imposing former palace of a French King, with short boxed hedge gardens behind the high fences so we walked into the large courtyard inside the palace walls & managed to have a look at the glass pyramid entrance from a good angle. We then walked back out & along to the priority tourist entrance & the line was only about 100 + deep going through security. The buildings surrounding the Louvre are also very nice & makes for an appealing streetscape.

We walked out next to the glass pyramid entrance & this had hundreds of people lined up. The palace is very ornate & covered in all forms of beautiful statues on the outside. We had a look through a window of the palace into a large display area of large ornate statues, very effective. Outside again we walked past the gilded statue of Joan of Arc riding a horse, that looked across to the formal gardens of the palace. We then wandered down to a triumphal arch that celebrated the victory of Napoleon over the Austrians that was in front of the Louvre.

The very large garden in front of the Louvre leading down to the Plaza De La Concorde had a number of nice water features and a nice formal garden structure with lots of manicured trees. We enjoyed a pleasant stroll, however, two platoons of heavily armed soldiers walking through the gardens brought a dose of reality back to our lives – Paris is taking security very seriously. A large Ferris wheel was on the edge of the Plaza De La Concorde & an Egyptian obelisk in the middle with ornate fountains either side. This was the site of the guillotine execution of King Louis 16^th in January 1793 & his wife Marie Antoinette in October 1793. From this site there is a grand view up the Champs Elysees to the Arc De Triumph. The Eiffel Tower is also prominent on the skyline.

From there we walked along the Seine to the Pont Alexander 3^rd, a beautiful & ornate bridge with large beautiful gilded horse & angel statues on pillars at either end of the bridge & ornate decorations all along it, this must be the most beautiful bridge in Paris. We turned back & headed to our hotel along the other side of the Seine, had lunch & rested our weary feet for an hour or so.

After our rest we walked along the small backstreets behind our hotel roughly in the direction of Notre Dame Cathedral. The backstreets are full of small art galleries, cafes, creparies, modern design furniture & clothes stores. Needless to say our walk was slow as we stopped to peruse lots of windows. It was good to get a feel for the Paris behind the main streets where daily life occurs, it was very pleasant soaking it all in & experiencing the feel of Paris.

Notre Dame Cathedral had even more people queued up than yesterday, so we kept on walking & rested our legs on a bench in the small park behind the cathedral. Some more armed soldiers wandered past patrolling this area as well. Rested we ventured down onto Isle St Louis again, it is such a beautiful area & we again soaked in the ambience of the street life in this quite part of Paris. Again we took our time strolling back to our hotel, taking another route so that we could see more of the street life & ended up at around 5pm at our hotel for another rest for our weary feet. Looking at the map we estimate that we have walked 12-15 kms. Today.

Around 7pm we ventured out for dinner, looking at lots of different cafes (amazing how popular these side cafes are on the streets the tables were all occupied, if you wanted one of those tables you had to wait) within a couple of streets from our hotel before settling on the Café de Paris for a romantic dinner and looking out at the Parisian street life passing by (most of the chairs are strategically placed so that people can see the passers-by). We both started with French onion soup, now we both knew what it should really taste like – delicious. Tereza had roasted comfrey duck & I had the roasted lamb (French style), the meat on both just fell apart it was that tender & the taste was again – delicious. As always there was too much to eat & we needed more than the short walk back to our hotel to walk it off. Another spa bath for Tereza to soak away the tiredness. It is only starting to get dark & it is almost 11pm.

We both like Paris, it is a really nice city to be in & we are enjoying it more than Amsterdam & even London. We could spend a lot more time here easily. If we weren’t so time poor we would have loved to have seen many of the beautiful churches & museums etc., next time. The people are friendly & polite & not in so much of a rush (we think anyway). Another fantastic day & it only spat light rain on us a few times today.

We needed a breather between our tours, we are very happy that we came back to Paris even if it was for a very short time.