Paris- 11th till 20th July

Sacre Coeur

Ah Paris!   We were really keen to be right in amongst it for Paris and so we checked our camper-van into a campground on the outskirts of town and headed to a new temporary home, an apartment in Montmartre.

Morgan and I had previously visited Paris about 9 years ago, when we spent a fabulous few days exploring all the major sites with my family.  We were grateful that we had done all of the "big sites" because this time the atrocious weather, peak season crowds and one horrible man cold seriously dampened our tourist-mojo.  It did however, give us a great chance to have a "holiday" from all the travelling, to do a lot of mooching and also to see some of the less popular or less well known sites.  It also gave us a chance to spend some time with Morgan's cousins who were in Paris (actually staying just around the corner!) for the weekend.  We even had a house guest, Morgan's cousin Sophie, who now lives in Paris and gave us a lot of great suggestions and advice.

Our apartment was in Montmartre and was a very sweet, very Parisian one bedroom place.  The area of Montmartre will be known to some people as the site of Moulin Rouge (we didn't go) and others Sacre Coeur (we eventually did).  While in some parts it was absolutely heaving with tourists you only had to turn a couple of corners or eat a bit later in the evening to avoid the crowds.

Our lounge

The streets of Montmartre

View from our window down Rue Lepic.  That's Les Moulin de la Galette, one of the two windmills in Montmartre, the other being Moulin Rouge.  This one was a restaurant.

There were heaps of cute bars and restaurants in the vicinity and we made a thorough exploration of them!  It helped that there was an amazing atmosphere in the area during that week as people celebrated before their summer holidays and Bastille Day.  Our two local bars had people spilling out onto the sidewalks from late afternoon and were open until around 3am (or so I hear....).

One of our two local bars.  On the roof are hundreds of amazing black and white portraits and local scenery photos by one of the bar patrons.  I met him and now have my own momento in my diary.

The other of our locals, right across the intersection from the first! 2 euro for a glass of rose!

The food was, of course, amazing.  Highlights included one of our local restaurants, Le Petit Parisien, where I had the most amazing molten chocolate cake dessert and where Morgan managed to order himself a dessert the size of his head (seriously!).  The other highlight had to be the souffle restaurant recommended by Amanda, a friend of my sister Sarah and our recent travelling companion in Sicily.  We also tried our own hand at things, doing a cooking course.  This was a lot of fun as we first went shopping for all of the ingredients at the fromagerie and boucherie etc and then, after helping to cook, we got to eat our efforts.

Our neighbourhood bistro.

This monster was composed of a crispy meringue base with a centre of liquid raspberry, topped with raspberry sorbet and topped by an entire bottle of whipped cream by the looks!  You should have seen the stares!

Our savoury souffles.  They were amzing- so incredibly light and full of flavour.  That's mushroom for me and crab for Morgan.

Apricot souffle- nom nom....nom

Our cooking course with our chef Constance.  She was cute as a button, a great chef and very nice...as long as you kept your station tidy and didn't suggest cheese as a starter or dessert course!

Our entree- fennel and citrus with seared squid (which we cleaned ourselves), prawns and a prawn burre blanc sauce.

Plating up the main.  That's veal with baby potatoes, green beans and a mixture of hazelnuts and lardons.  Sigh!  Needless to say after our entree, main, cheese and then dessert we definitely didn't eat any dinner!

Oh yeah, the sights!  We did see some I promise.  On one of our two days of sunshine we travelled around the centre of Paris, looking at queues and the outside of attractions.  While I vetoed Morgan's idea of visiting the Museum of Waterworks and Sewerage (although there definitely wouldn't have been a line there), we did visit the Montparnasse cemetery, the Museum of Industrial Science, the Opera House and the crypt underneath the Notre Dame cathedral.

Vendome column

Jardin des Tuileries beside the Louvre

Me in front of the Louvre

The Louvre

A random, very cool building.  No idea what it was.

A very cool sculpture in front of Eustache Church

Eustache Church- must suck being one of the "other" churches in Paris

The Pompidou Centre

The queue outside the catacombs.  It went around the block and wasn't moving at all, seriously.

A sculpture on one of the graves in the Montparnasse cemetery.  Points to any medical geeks who guessed that this belongs to Lis Franc.

The Montparnasse cemetery was very impressive.  It was absolutely huge and many of the graves were mausoleum's.

Another of the more interesting graves.

Palais de Justice

La Seine

Notre Dame Cathedral

Notre Dame Cathedral

The Opera House

The grand staircase in the Opera House

I think gold was the look they were going for.

The scale model that was used to fabricate the full-size Statue of Liberty.  Outside the Museum of Industrial Science.

It was wonderful to spend some time with Morgan's cousin Nick who was visiting from Russia with his lovely wife Di and their wonderful boys Bryn and Harry.  Together we valiantly tried to do a bus tour of the sights, despite the cold and the rain!  A big thanks to Harry for keeping me entertained!

Most of the sights that day included an umbrella!

The Arc de Triomphe

A little crooked I know, but in my defence it was taken while cornering in a bus, from under an umbrella.  

Cour Carree

Nick with Bryn and Harry

The lovely Sophie taking advantage of the free world-wide phone calls that came with the apartment rental.

As I mentioned, we were lucky enough to be in Paris on Bastille Day.  We went to watch the parade with the rest of Paris.  Our views were mostly of the back of people's heads but we did get a good view of the planes doing their fly-over and later on we saw the tanks and other weapons, which made Morgan very happy.

Neigh-neighs.

Part of the fly-by? fly-over?  I should probably have let Morgan do this bit.

Military parade.  

Happy boy.

On our last full day we braved the weather and headed out to La Defense.  This is a business area in the west of Paris, named after the statue "La Defense de Paris", erected in 1883.  It's home to the biggest collection of modern steel and glass buildings I have ever seen.  To me it looked like an architect had been asked to do a model for their idea of the "City of the Future".  The buildings, including the centre-piece the Grande Arche, were amazing and on a fine day you can apparently seen all the way down to the Arc de Triomphe.  Of course it wasn't a fine day...

La Grande Arche

So all up we had a wonderful, indulgent time in Paris.  We were so glad to have stayed where we did and experience a small slice of Parisian life.  But all good things must come to an end and by the time we left we definitely felt ready to hit the road again......