Before you begin, don’t forget Part 1 and Part 2!
Bon Ani! It was New Years day and we had just woke after five hours of sleep following a spectacular New Years Eve show. We were armed with Red Bull and ready to see Paris before the forecasted evening rain came on. We headed to the corner bakery for a fresh from the oven croissant and chocolate baguette. They were literally pulling a fresh tray of croissants out of the oven as we walked in! Yum!!! It was the perfect balance of soft inside, flaky outside and had a great buttery taste! From here we took the metro to check out the Arc de Triomphe. Being a holiday, all monuments and museums were closed, so we planned a day of photographing everything from the outside and walking around as much as the city as we could! We roamed all the way down Champs-Élysées from the Arc to the Lourve! We made a stop at a cafe for their famous chocolate chaud or as we call it, hot chocolate and then continued on with our walk down the most famous shopping street in Paris.
French Lesson Intermission:
Traditional Chocolate Chaud comes as three separate parts that you can mix to your liking. One pitcher full of steaming hot milk, a bowl of chocolate flakes or chips and a large bowl of whipped topping. You can add all of these ingredients to your cup in whatever ratio pleases your palate. I’m not a huge chocolate fan, so I prefer it heavy on the milk with just a bit of chocolate added in for a nice flavor and topped with tons of fluffy white whipped cream!
We headed to Laduree for the world famous macarons. After quite a long wait in line and some confusion from the staff, we eventually got our turn to choose from a great assortment of flavors. We ordered everything from a basic vanilla to pistachio flavor and then were on our way to find a place to sit and enjoy our treats. Tony and I walked across the road to Starbucks, ordered our triple shot caramel macchiatos with extra caramel and did a blind taste test of our macarons. We sat and enjoyed a little comfort of home with our coffees and reveled in the fact that we were in Paris on the Champs Elysees eating macarons. I felt extremely fancy for that brief moment. The results from our blind taste test are in with flavors ranked from best to worst: Lemon, pistachio, chocolate, vanilla, salted caramel and a disgusting strawberry candy bringing up the rear or “Strawberry of death” as Tony is calling it. It seriously was not good guys!
We walked some more down the road and eventually arrived at some sort of pop up Christmas fair: there were booths and stalls selling all sorts of delicious foods, homemade goods and MORE delicious foods! Luckily we didn’t have much cash on us or we would have had crepes, waffles, churos and all of the other odd looking, but great smelling snacks! We ended up getting onion soup from a stall labeled “here is good soup” and were not disappointed. It was hot and surprisingly a good food for on the go to keep us warm and happy while we continued our walk! It rained a bit on us, but we did our best to stay dry. We continued until we got to the Louvre where we decided it wasn’t quite dark enough yet for photos here. We went to a restaurant for a nice long dinner with good service and a cozy atmosphere. We left as it was getting dark and took photos of the Louvre. Of course then it started pouring again, but we toughed it out because we wanted a few more shots! We rode the metro back to the Arc de Triomphe and got photos of it at night along with the traffic and lights of Champs-Elysées. Then called it a night.
On day four of Lyndsay Curtis Photographys excellent adventure to Paris we had a failed attempt of waking up early to head to Versailles! But it kind of worked out perfectly in a way, because the morning was full of awful rain and we wouldn’t have wanted to be out in that anyways. So slept through the rain and woke up to clear skies! There was a bakery nearby our apartment on Rue de Saxe that was recommended to us, so we walked over and picked up a croissant, chocolate croissant and two baguettes. I had a plan to surprise Tony with something pretty nerdy and awesome involving these two baguettes. We ate our croissants as we walked to the metro and then took the train to the base of the Eiffel Tower. We wandered along taking some neat shots up close to the tower and then were off to have a baguette sword fight. Oh yes, you did read that right. That was my big awesome plan. I wanted a photo of Tony and I “sword” fighting in front of the Eiffel Tower. I feel bad for the fellow traveler who I asked to take a few shots… he probably assumed we would pose and smile or maybe share a kiss, but no… we busted out our bread and began to fight to the death. Even still, I don’t think we were the dumbest looking people there! Tourists do some crazy weird poses, including jumping, carrying the tower on their back, picking it up with one hand or spelling out 2014 on their hands with the help from a friend.
We hopped on the train towards Notre Dame and the bridge of love locks. This is where lovers buy a lock, inscribe their initials, lock it onto the bridge and then throw away the key to symbolize their unbreakable love. While on the bridge, we saw dozens of couples from countries all over the world, there to lock in their love forever. I took a few minutes to scan through all of the locks and read the inscriptions. There were locks for couples there on an anniversary, locks for women and their “future husband” and even locks proposing marriage! Tony and I bought a lock from a shop nearby and inscribed our full names along with the year.
Tony and I wandered over to Saint Chapelle and waited in the line to see the beautiful stained glass works that this cathedral has to offer. I highly recommend checking this one out! It isn’t one of the big well known sights of Paris, but It was definitely one of my highlights from the trip. We grabbed lunch at a restaurant across the street. It was cramped and overpriced, but well timed and pretty delicious. From there we headed over to Blvd Beaumarchais which is lined with camera stores as far as the eye can see! We stopped by the Leika store and saw several shops that had hundreds of antique cameras lining their storefront.
After a bit of shopping, we took the train back to Notre Dame in hopes of heading up to the top of the tower for a unique view of Paris, but they closed an hour and a half early! Rightfully so, us and a lot of other tourists were pretty upset, but we took this as a chance to head to Sacre Coeur in hopes of enjoying the sunset from there! We took the funicular to reach the top of the hill quickly and got there just in time for the view of the Eiffel Tower at sunset. We went inside Sacre Coeur and quickly decided it was one of our least favorite churches. It just seemed too commercialized. Too many posters with writing in a zillion different languages begging for donations and built in book stores and souvenir shops. Men telling you no photos, but then pushing you to buy theirs from the gift shop. It was pretty from the outside and the 60 ft Jesus was pretty impressive, but I prefer a dusty old Church any day. We walked the streets of the Montmarte neighborhood and sipped some awful vin chaud (hot spiced wine). I found a lot of neat souvenir shops in this neighborhood and grabbed a few trinkets for myself and friends. Tony and I strolled through the rest of the neighborhood and down the hill until we reached the moulin rouge where we got some photographs and did a small segment for our Paris time-lapse.
Check back next week for the fourth and final installment of the Paris Travel Thursday blog series! We’ll be checking off two big things on my Paris Travel must-do list!
//Lyndsay.
