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| Something for next time! |
Our breakfast attendant at the hotel took our photo and then I took his photo.
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| Our breakfast attendant. I never got his name. |
R and I had decided that we would go on our own to Paris and Admirát and Sarah would go together. I felt like I was at a little slower pace than the others and didn't want to hold them up, so one goal was to do less walking.
R's mom walked with us to the RER station and I bought another day pass. R's mom thought I would be cold so she gave me her beautiful scarf to wear and to keep.
Then we got on the train toward Paris. We disembarked at the Charles De Gaulle Ètoile station and transferred over to a subway train and then got off for a little walk to the Eiffel Tower. Thank God I was with R as there were lots of twists and turns. When we got out of the subway station, I saw a site familiar to me from my San Francisco days. There were many street vendors selling mini Eiffel Tower keychains and other assorted items. They were every few feet on the walk to the Eiffel Tower. Most vendors looked like African men, but R said she did not recognize the language they were speaking. I Googled a few articles on the Internet about it. It does seem like an organized group that buys items from China and then sells them cheap on the street. And the police have had no success and breaking up this illegal activity. Wow! Maybe it’s not quite as innocent as hippies selling homemade bracelets at Fisherman’s Wharf.
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| Street vendors selling Eiffel Tower souvenirs |
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| Going through initial security at Eiffel Tower |
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| Needs no introduction |
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| See, I was really there! |
Then we stood in line to enter the Eiffel Tower and take an elevator to the second floor. We went through another bag check; however, when we got to the end of that line, we found out that we had to go back out and across the grounds to buy our tickets.
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| Ticket |
So we did. It’s all a learning adventure.
By the way, we couldn't go to the top of the Tower as it was not open that day. The top floor was closed from Jan15 through Feb 2 for its annual maintenance.
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| Waiting for the elevator to the 2nd floor |
After going through security the second time, we got on the elevator which took us to the second floor. The second floor is a 360-degree observation deck from which you can look out over the city of Paris. However it was a very foggy and chilly day so we didn’t see as much as we might have on a sunny day. We did see the Seine River which was very close to the top of its banks. The Seine has been at flood-stage level which has concerned the authorities. We weren’t able to take the boat tour we had been planning because the river was too high for the boats to fit under the bridges that span the Seine.
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| Another elevator picture |
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| The Seine as seen from the 2nd floor of Eiffel Tower |
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| The Seine is at a very high level. |
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| From the second floor looking out |
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| This is actually the floor of the first floor looking down t the ground. It's a thick glass panel. http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/travel/eiffel-tower-glass-floor/index.html |
By now it was afternoon and we were hungry again so we ate at the restaurant on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. We ate at the 58 Tour Eiffel Restaurant, which is so named because it is 57 meters (190 feet or about 18 stories) above the ground with a meter added for the height of the kitchen range.
Many of the restaurants we went to have a choice of ordering a meal with a starter/the main course/ and then cheese or dessert for a set price. It is a nice way to taste a few different things. They also bring bread, but do not give you a bread plate, and they do not bring butter. So you put the bread right on the placemat and eat without butter unless you ask for it. I found the following link on the Internet after I got home.
https://www.davidlebovitz.com/french-bread-on-the-table/
For the starter, I had the creamy mushroom soup with cep mushrooms and Grison's dried beef (off to the left in a cup behind the main dish below). (from the Web: "The cep is the king of edible mushrooms. No food, fungal or otherwise, comes near it for flavor and texture and when you find a firm young penny bun, or ‘bouchon’ cep as the French call it after champagne corks, there is an irresistible fairy-tale beauty to them which is both beautiful and seductive." Wow! Grison's dried beef is a dried beef from the Grisons area of Switzerland.
For the main course, I ordered the elbow pasta with duck confit cooked with herbs and persillade sauce. Wikipedia: "Confit as a cooking term describes when food is cooked in grease, oil or sugar water (syrup), at a lower temperature, as opposed to deep frying. While deep frying typically takes place at temperatures of 160–230 °C (325–450 °F), confit preparations are done at a much lower temperature, such as an oil temperature of around 90 °C (200 °F), sometimes even cooler. The term is usually used in modern cuisine to mean long slow cooking in oil or fat at low temperatures, many having no element of preservation such as dishes like confit potatoes. Confit of duck (confit de canard) is usually prepared from the legs of the bird.
Persillade is a sauce or seasoning mixture of parsley chopped together with seasonings including garlic, herbs, oil, and vinegar. In its simplest form, just parsley and garlic, it is a common ingredient in many dishes, part of a sauté cook's 'mise en place.'"
For dessert, I had the lemon meringue cream with crumble topping. (That one needs no Wikipedia lookup.)
(In the French language, they use the comma in place of the decimal point for prices. The E looking symbol on the menu is for the Euro.)
Many of the restaurants we went to have a choice of ordering a meal with a starter/the main course/ and then cheese or dessert for a set price. It is a nice way to taste a few different things. They also bring bread, but do not give you a bread plate, and they do not bring butter. So you put the bread right on the placemat and eat without butter unless you ask for it. I found the following link on the Internet after I got home.
https://www.davidlebovitz.com/french-bread-on-the-table/
For the starter, I had the creamy mushroom soup with cep mushrooms and Grison's dried beef (off to the left in a cup behind the main dish below). (from the Web: "The cep is the king of edible mushrooms. No food, fungal or otherwise, comes near it for flavor and texture and when you find a firm young penny bun, or ‘bouchon’ cep as the French call it after champagne corks, there is an irresistible fairy-tale beauty to them which is both beautiful and seductive." Wow! Grison's dried beef is a dried beef from the Grisons area of Switzerland.
For the main course, I ordered the elbow pasta with duck confit cooked with herbs and persillade sauce. Wikipedia: "Confit as a cooking term describes when food is cooked in grease, oil or sugar water (syrup), at a lower temperature, as opposed to deep frying. While deep frying typically takes place at temperatures of 160–230 °C (325–450 °F), confit preparations are done at a much lower temperature, such as an oil temperature of around 90 °C (200 °F), sometimes even cooler. The term is usually used in modern cuisine to mean long slow cooking in oil or fat at low temperatures, many having no element of preservation such as dishes like confit potatoes. Confit of duck (confit de canard) is usually prepared from the legs of the bird.
Persillade is a sauce or seasoning mixture of parsley chopped together with seasonings including garlic, herbs, oil, and vinegar. In its simplest form, just parsley and garlic, it is a common ingredient in many dishes, part of a sauté cook's 'mise en place.'"
For dessert, I had the lemon meringue cream with crumble topping. (That one needs no Wikipedia lookup.)
(In the French language, they use the comma in place of the decimal point for prices. The E looking symbol on the menu is for the Euro.)
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| Elbow pasta with duck confit |
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| Lemon meringue cream with crumble topping |
At about 3:15 we headed back to the subway station, a 15-minute walk, and took the subway back to the RER train. We took the RER train up one stop and got off and walked to the Garnier opera house.
When we arrived there, we could only go in for 30 minutes because it was closing. And we could only take a self-guided tour. So we bought our tickets for a 30-minute visit!
The place was beautiful with lots of stairways and gilded columns and paintings on the ceiling. It is still an active opera house today. However I had to go to Wikipedia to find out what we were actually looking at:
"The Palais Garnier is a 1,979-seat opera house, which was built from 1861 to 1875 for the Paris Opera. The theater is also often referred to as the Opéra Garnier as it was the primary home of the Paris Opera. The Palais Garnier has been called probably the most famous opera house in the world, a symbol of Paris like Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, or the Sacré Coeur Basilica. This is at least partly due to its use as the setting for Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera and, especially, the novel's subsequent adaptations in films and Andrew Lloyd Webber's popular 1986 musical. Another contributing factor is that among the buildings constructed in Paris during the Second Empire, besides being the most expensive,it has been described as the only one that is unquestionably a masterpiece of the first rank."
When we were done looking at the opera house, we were both very tired so we decided that was all of Paris we were going to see. This was fine with me. I had now seen Paris and I had seen the Eiffel Tower and I had seen the Seine River. And all of that made me very happy. We took the train back to Torcy and walked from the station to R's car.
We then went to the Leroy Merlin do-it-yourself store in the Bay 2 Shopping Center. It is a BIG do-it yourself store where R picked up some more boxes to help her with her move. (I took these photos mainly for Angie and Ramona who love to decorate and improve their homes!)
https://france.leroymerlin.com/sites/default/files/inline-files/Presentation_Leroy_Merlin_France_avril_2017_en.pdf
After that we went to dinner at Saveurs Du Monde in the Centre Bay shopping center, right next to our hotel. I got crepes both for the meal and for the desert. They weren’t quite like the crepes I remembered from the Magic Pan restaurant in San Francisco when I was in my 20's. But they were good.
After eating we went back to our hotel where I packed my suitcase to be ready to leave on Monday. Sunday will be spent with the believers at fellowship and a meal with them.
Oh and by the way, here are my steps for today!
A little less than yesterday!
After that we went to dinner at Saveurs Du Monde in the Centre Bay shopping center, right next to our hotel. I got crepes both for the meal and for the desert. They weren’t quite like the crepes I remembered from the Magic Pan restaurant in San Francisco when I was in my 20's. But they were good.
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| My dinner crepe |
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| Rosemay's meal |
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| The desert Nutella crepe |
After eating we went back to our hotel where I packed my suitcase to be ready to leave on Monday. Sunday will be spent with the believers at fellowship and a meal with them.
Oh and by the way, here are my steps for today!
A little less than yesterday!
Thank you, Laura, for posting about your travels for those of us who aren't there. Reading it puts me right there! So glad you're having a good trip.
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