The Thanksgiving Weekend - Part 2

S & I have gotten good enough at French so that stopping strangers for info is no longer the horror it once was. We're great at the tag team approach. It starts with outlining the problem and what needs to be asked. "How should I say that?" Followed by suggestions on vocab and proper conjugation, dialogue is then quickly composed and finally an unsuspecting stranger is targeted. One of our favorite parts is delivering the lines and then watching the other person struggle with our accent. On our 2nd day in Paris we had a list of things to do but were running low on the old 'gazole' so we needed to find a gas station that a) was open on Sunday and that b) sold diesel. Not an easy task in downtown Paris because gas stations are often nothing more than a couple of pumps plopped down on a sidewalk on some side street. Not easy to spot if you know what I mean. So anyway, as we walk to the Rodin Museum I see a man coming toward us and after a brief confab it is decided that I should ask him if he knows where a gas station is. "Pardon Monsieur, est-ce que vous pourrait m’aide? Est-ce que il y a une station-service près d’ici ?" I say, smiling at him as if he’s a small frightened animal that I might scare away. "Well, to tell truth I've seen one round but can't say for sure where, maybe try the next street over" he replies with a British accent and pointing in a distracted manner down the road. "Thanks, we'll try there" I mumble, moving away feeling relieved and disappointed at the same time.

So we had reserved a room at a château east of Paris. We made this reservation back in early October, and in early November I received a call from the owner saying that there had been a fire in the room (cigarette - bed - 'nough said) we had reserved and that she had no other rooms to offer us. She was sorry for the inconvenience but if we could wait 8 weeks we could stay in that room then. Well, no, we were going to Paris because S had a meeting in Blois on that Monday morning and Thanksgiving gave us a good excuse for a three day weekend before hand to spend some time in Paris. So we stayed, instead, at 'Le Clos Saint Nicolas' in Neauphle-le-Château, bout 30 minutes west of Paris. Le Clos is not so much a château as and old mansion. But it was wonderful just the same. The room was large and the bathroom was brand new, retrofitted into what may have been a closet or something. There was a humongous wardrobe in our room that I felt fairly certain would lead me eventually to Narnia if I chose to climb in and walk toward the back of it. The best part of this particular bed & breakfast was, well, the breakfast. Not that the food was that great, just yogurt, juice, toast, coffee and a good selection of homemade jams. (One of the jams was a delicious blend of apricot and honey and S had to stop me from slipping the jar into my purse) No, the great part was that breakfast was served in the conservatory. You know a real conservatory, like you read about in books, like in ‘Clue’, with glass walls and plants and stuff. It was wonderful to sit there in the warmth of a patio heater and be able to see outside. Of course outside it was foggy and drizzly and cold and basically all around yucky, but it was still nice to sit and look outside and eat in our own private little jungle. Our first night we had the best and most expensive dinner of our lives, and it was completely unplanned. We arrived into town after dark and were looking for a place to eat dinner - insert here, grousing, whining, walking, bickering, complaining, grumbling - and we found another mansion/hotel with a restaurant in it. S was in jeans, I was in sweats and when we stopped and peaked at the menu posted outside we were prepared to be rejected solely based on our lack of proper dinner attire. But no, they hardly looked at what we were wearing. They ushered us to a table where we practically had our own personal wait staff. Glasses were never allowed to get below ½ full. Every need was anticipated and the food was heavenly. The entrée was a lobster salad that was so incredibly good...the lobster was seasoned and so tender and just mouthwateringly perfect... The main course was beef with these tiny mushrooms (that I did not eat, sorry but ewww) with this sauce and these potatoes that were topped with this wonderful green vegetable mouse stuff. There were wines and fresh baked breads and dessert, (mine was crème brûle, or actually three different crème brûles; Vanilla, chocolate and ginger flavored crème brûle that was amazing.) coffee and then of course ‘l'addition’ which we’ll not discuss. It was a serendipitous find!

The weird thing is that when you tell people that you are going to or have been to Paris they inevitable say 'Oh really, did you go to/have you been to/you should go to ::insert name of their favorite site here::' Honestly most stuff is stuff that off course you've done, Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Champs Elysée, but some things are just like, 'I don't even know what you just said' or 'I've never heard of that, where is it and what is it'. My point being that there is so much to see in Paris depending on what your tastes are and how much money you want to spend that you would need months to explore it all. And forget about trying to get a 'cultural experience' in Paris because any tourist type stuff you do will be swarming with foreigners and almost everyone in the shops and restaurants speaks English... So where was I going with this... What we did in Paris on this weekend. First we went to Montmartre to the Basilique du Sacré Cœur or as I refer to it (now that I read the guide book about it) ‘the church that guilt built’. And I quote “The Sacred Heart Basilica perched at the very top of the Butte de Montmartre, was built from contributions pledged by Parisian Catholics as an act of contrition after the humiliating Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1...and if you want to know what was so humiliating about it I'll let you read all about it. Ok, ‘we went to Montmartre’ sounds like we just, you know, got in the car and drove right on over. Well it turned out to be a bit more difficult than that. See it's one thing to read a map and quite another to be faced with the actual roads. As we have covered many, many, many times, street signs in France are rare and to add insult to injury when you enter one of those lovely round-abouts with six or 8 streets feeding into/out of it all bets are off and you'd get much farther down the road asking a magic eight ball which road to take as looking at the map. So our method consisted of 10% looking at the map 45% watching for church spires and driving in their general direction and 45% just plain old heading uphill. Of course then you add into the mix trying to find a place to park as you drive while all the while not being sure how far of a walk it will be if you take that first available space. We got incredibly lucky that by the time we found a parking space (actually it was an area of sidewalk bordering some street work that got us just off the road so others could drive past...Hey, when in France...) we had a very short uphill walk. The church itself is, well, it’s a church, it’s big, it has a beautiful dome. The big draw though is the view and the gazillion stairs that you can climb up the front to get to it. (Insert here happy dance for finding great ‘parking space’ around the corner) You can climb up to the dome and they say that on a good clear day you can see up to thirty miles around. Of course as you might recall the aforementioned fog.. but S climbed to the dome and took a few photos anyway.

Then we went to Versailles, which S had already been to this summer while I was away and he had meetings in Paris, but I had not seen it and needed to check it off of my 'must see' list. The sheer size of the place is impressive; the scope of what was done there is mind boggling. Just the number of people that had to be employed... (or in servitude of some sort) ... to maintain the gardens is unbelievable, let alone household staff. (No wonder Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were beheaded! Though, granted, they were just the latest occupants of the mansion, but the most out of control.) (I imagine ABC's Peter Jennings doing an 'It's Your Money' segment about the prodigious waste of tax dollars and leading the indignant and incited crowd to the château to demand redress or blood.) And let me just say that not one of Hollywood’s wealthiest stars has an entourage of 6000 people to house, I'd say Bill Gates might, but I don't think he has that many friends. I'm guessing that the household staff could have benefited from the use of roller blades (well except for the stairs) or walkie talkies. Some of the massive gardens were used as outdoor dining rooms and ball rooms to escape the summer time heat of the mansion. Then there's the number of fountains in the gardens, it would have required quite a sophisticated water pumping system to have them all going (none of them run in the winter for obvious reasons, but I think it makes for better pictures of the actual sculptures this way). If you pick a garden, any garden, off of the main canal you find that there are paths that lead you deeper and deeper into that section of garden. For landmarks there are fountains at central spots with other paths branching off in every other direction. You could literally get lost out there, though I imagine it would be a great place for paint ball or laser tag. Of course all the main flower beds were freshly planted for springtime shows so we'll have to go back when everything is blooming. The advantage of visiting these places in the fall/winter is, of course, that you don't have to wait in line or fight crowds or, in the case of Versailles, pay an entrance fee to visit the grounds. The downside is that you never get to see them at their best because that's when repairs are done and when the gardens are pretty bleak and also when none of the fountains are actually going. True to form an entire wing of the château was hidden behind scaffolding and tarps and on one end they are replacing and repainting the famous windows of the Orangerie.

Then there was our visit to Giverny which was a complete waste because the place was closed (so much for the guide book), Claude Monet's home and studio, the gardens, heck the whole darned town was closed it seemed. Which is sad since it took us 30 minutes out of Paris and then 30 minutes back, but on the other hand, it's another one of those places that I would love to see in the spring or summer anyway. We revisited the Rodin Museum because I just love it. We had lunch there on Sunday. The garden is nothing like Versailles but it's very peaceful and I love the sculptures and something about the setting is just very romantic. We walked along the Champs Elysée, actually S pulled a 'French' and parked on the sidewalk along the Champs Elysée and we walked up and down on Saturday night with all the Christmas lights and all the shoppers. It was cold and noisy and very exciting. I think it was at that point that we decided to retire there. We visited the Hôtel des Invalides, which houses Napoleon's Tomb, the Église des Soldats and the Musée d l’Armée. It was so much to see. The Army museum is vast and filled with several floors of nothing but weapons and uniforms and flags and maps. (La, I wish we'd gone in when you guys were here, Mark would have loved it) The best part of the Army museum though is the top floor which houses the 'Relief Map Museum'. A large room filled with giant table top relief maps. Huge maps of some of the major fortresses of France, with scale models of the towns and hills and people and churches. It is an amazing site. The room is dark and the maps are spotlighted and each tiny town is a perfect replica of what the original was like back in Napoleon's day.

There is so much more to tell, but I need to post this and get the pictures posted too. So I'll stop now. I'll just say that we found "The Real McCoy' again in Paris which is a tiny little grocery store that sells american products for about a 400% mark-up. It's worth it when you consider what it costs to ship stuff here. So we picked up a few comfort food type things that we didn't even know we'd missed. On Monday after S's meeting in Blois we stopped in Limouge on the way home, where I picked up a few pieces of porcelain at one of the many shops. A beautiful and delicate coffee service for 4. S insists that we must use it though, otherwise it will become just another thing tucked into a cupboard never to be seen again. And now, the pictures.

This is the view from our window at the bed and breakfast. Testament to the exterior yuckiness.

S in front of the Château de Versailles, this is only a small part of the giant palace, but I believe he's standing in front of the windows of the kings bed chamber.

This is the fountain of the Basin of Apollo in which Apollo's chariot is being pulled by rearing horses emerging from the water. It is halfway between the palace and the grand canal which you can see in the distance behind the fountain.

Another fountain in the gardens. Don't ask me which one this is or even where it is, I was pretty lost at this point, but I liked it.

Hey look, it's me! Looking out over where they are repairing the windows to the orangerie. Those green scrolly looking things on the ground are lawn, but if you look at the borders and edges, that is not lawn. That is actually perfectly manicured little hedges that stand about 4 or 5 inches tall. Isn't that wild?

This is a photo of part of the garden at the Rodin Museum, taken from the far end of the garden looking over the fountain and toward the museum building. It really is quite a peaceful place.

Sort of the same shot but more centered and in front of the trellis work.

This is the Basilique du Sacré Cœur at night. We went back that night so we could get this shot, and some others of the view.

This is the dome over Napoleon's tomb.

This is Napoleon's Tomb, centered below the dome and on the lower floor of the church. Napoleon's remains are in a series of 6 nested coffins like a Russian matryoshka doll. The coffins are made of tin, mahogany, two made of lead, ebony and the one we see is made of red porphyry (a stone) from Finland. His tomb is ringed by giant statues that glorify his wartime achievements and the walls of the hall around his tomb are adorned with 10 bas-relief sculptures that depict his civil achievements. It's hard to get a good idea of the size of the tomb, it is beyond massive. The man standing in the hall in the background of the picture sort of gives you an idea of the size. (Over compensating for something?)

The Eglise du Dôme, which houses Napoleon's tomb also houses the tombs of others. Including such famous French soldiers as Turenne, Bauban, Foch, Lyautey and some of Napoleon's close relations including his son - the king of Rome, and two of his brothers. Don't ask me whose tomb this was because I don't remember and I didn't write it down.

The Hôtel des Invalides at night. The dome and decorations were regilded in 1989, it took 12 kg (26.5 lbs.) of gold.

This is one of the relief maps in the museum. This is the relief map of Mt St. Michel which La and Mark and I visited last summer. If you walk around it you can see that there used to be stairs leading straight up into the walls in a few places. I don't recall seeing those last summer on the real thing.