Paris : Notre Dame & La Defense!

Paris : Notre Dame & La Defense!

Monday (the 14th April) after I woke up feeling almost human and HUNGRY, Steve and I took ourselves downstairs to enjoy the breakfast St Christopher's Inn had provided for us... Yum! We had also both decided that we were kind of running out of a few clean essentials (undies etc) and needed to do some washing. Lucky for us there was a Lavarie (or Laundromat) just half a block down the road. Lucky? Hmm not sure... turns out we just picked one of the dodgy machines and found our load of darks going round and around and around and around... with no end in sight. One of the lights on the machine was flashing and the little timer display (which was working fine on the other load) wasn't displaying on this one... TRAPPED the washing was... I thought to myself "What are we going to do?".

Those of you who have visited a laundromat before know that if it isn't manned (like the nice one we had in Queen's Park), then there is a service number to phone. Without thinking, I picked up Steve's mobile and phoned them to try and help with our trapped washing. When the lady answered the phone I politely asked "Parlais Vous Anglais?" and the response was a nasal "Non!". I thought to myself..."Hell, I don't speak any French." but I persisted with " Ermm, Lavarie, Rue De La Crimee, ummm broken"... and then hung up frustrated....

The next idea I had was to go to the shop next door and see if anyone spoke English there.. lucky the customer that was in the nice little shop at the time did... so I explained to her what was wrong. She then translated to the shop assistant... I grabbed Steve's phone out and asked the French Lady in the shop to tell the service lady what the problem was..and hope that she could sort it out by phone.. I very politely said "Merci Beaucoup" and she told me that the problem would be fixed. After returning to the Laundromat, we noticed that a few minutes later the digital time display had lit up again... PHEW! What seemed like a very long 30mins later, the washing machine finally released our very clean (and faded) darks.... Man, we were not impressed....

After returning our washing back to our room safe and sound Steve and I set out just down the road to the Metro at Crimee and caught a train down to Notre Dame. On our previous visit to Paris we had only admired the Notre Dame from the outside from the other side of the Seine Riverbank. It had started to rain a little by the time we emerged from the Metro...but hoped that by the time we came out from the great cathedral it would have stopped or eased up... As usual, inside these huge cathedrals it is always 10C cooler than on the outside.... after walking around this time in an anticlockwise direction Steve and I sat down in the aisle again to admire the architecture and design inside the great Notre Dame...

From the Notre Dame, Steve and I had planned to get to the Musee D'Orsay which was recommended to me by a friend - as a must see. What we had forgotten is that most museums close on Mondays, because they are open all weekend. Still, we initially headed in the wrong direction and then wandered around in a circle and then realised we were heading away from the museum rather than towards it. After a few moments Steve says "What day is it?" I said "Monday" to which he responded with "I bet the museums are closed today" and on arrival at the Musee D'Orsay discovered JUST THAT....

I looked at Steve and said "What's plan B?"... the truth was that we didn't have one..LOL so at that moment had to spontaneously decide to get on the Metro and head towards La Defense. We kind of ended up jumping off one stop before we should have, but it didn't matter because we found ourselves at a HUGE park called " Bois De Boulogne". The rain had actually stopped and the sun was peering through the clouds warming the air just ever so slightly. We had a nice relaxed walk towards La Defense...

La Defense is the skyscraper business city area on the western side of Paris and is the largest office development in Europe. Sure enough it is pretty impressive, just like any group of skyscrapers in any city. The oddest thing that strikes you about it is that gigantic hollow cube they have put right in the centre... called "The Grande Arche". It was designed by a Danish Architect by the name of Otto Von Spreckelsen in the late 1980's. It houses a gallery and a conference centre, but you also have the option of paying a fee and getting shuttled by an elevator to the top to admire the view. Personally, we got a pretty spectacular view from Sacre Coeur the day before, as well as one from the Eiffel Tower on our previous visit to the city.

Feeling pretty tired, the both of us we dragged our heels downstairs to the La Defense Metro station to try and head back home to Crimee. At some stage we had bought a carnet of Metro tickets so we could save on multiple fares while moving around Paris. It had turned out that we ended up walking most of the way anyway... because Paris is so accessible on foot. We had a few left over and decided to use a couple on the way home from La Defense. What we didn't realise was that the carnet we brought was probably for Zone 1 & 2...and La Defense was in Zone 3 and they wouldn't work... what a waste... Grumpy and tired, we slapped some more Euro's into the ticket machine, grabbed our tickets and headed back to Crimee...

On return to the hostel, I was pretty knackered and as usual headed for the shower to clean up and get into my Pyjama's so I could relax for the evening. For those of you who know me well.. know how much I love just hanging around in my Pj's. If I could spend my entire life in them... I probably would! By around 10pm.. I had fallen asleep in Steve's bed despite feeling guilty and trying desperately to stay awake while Steve researched the German leg of our trip...and booked a place to sleep. When I awoke...I turned to Steve and said "What time is it?" and he said "You don't want to know" Turns out it was 4:30am...!! The next morning Steve and I were getting on a fairly early train from Gare De Nord to our next destination - in Belgium, the city of Brugge....

Au Revoir Paris!



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