Our goals for this day included seeing Notre Dame, the Luxembourg Gardens, a nice cafe for lunch and a return to Montmarte to purchase the paintings we picked out earlier in the week. Okay, and maybe I wanted to get a few more scarves. At this point in the trip, I'd only purchased seven.
We stopped by the concierge desk on the way out and asked for a suggestion on where to eat lunch. This is when we realized how much effort went into suggesting a restaurant for us. It was not just a pick and choose thing, or a list of restaurants and cafes that are contracted with the hotel. First, she had to eliminate the cafes that were closed in August (lots of things are closed in August), then she eliminated the cafes that were too touristy to recommend and then she had to consider my allergies. She put a lot of work into it! This is probably why we had such wonderful, juicy morsels of dining experiences in Paris. She would not even tell us the name of a cafe near Notre Dame because she said they were too touristy, so she circled a neighborhood on our map a short walk from the Notre Dame area, and gave us the names of three cafes. The only word I remembered from the cafe recommendations was "flore," so that's what I looked for.
When we got to Notre Dame, it was crazy crowded and our museum passes wouldn't get us around the long line of tourists. Just as we were about to start our line waiting, we both realized that neither of us wanted to go inside the church, we just wanted to see the outside up close. So rather that wait in that long line and bump along with the crowd of people inside Notre Dame, we enjoyed a pleasant walk around it.
It's a very pretty area. The foliage had started to change so the trees were slight shades of orange mixed in with green. And it seems like Paris is one of those cities with so many trees that in places it almost seems like you are in a small town.
We left Notre Dame in search of the "flore" cafe, and along the way we ran into the place where normal people shop. There were so many stores along this walk, and they were moderately priced, so we treated ourselves to a few items, and only two more scarves. We ended up at the intersection of St. Germain and Bonaparte, the placed that was circled on the map. The first cafe we saw was named "Cafe Dux Magots". We decided NOT to go there. Instead, a few blocks down, we found the Cafe de Flore, and enjoyed a nice little lunch in what turned out to be a very historic cafe.
When we left the cafe, it was raining. This walk would come to be the end of my black flats that I took to Paris, as they were never quite the same after that walk. Even though it was raining, we were determined to fine the Luxembourg Gardens, so we walked. And we walked. And we walked. Sometimes straight, but mostly in circles. When we finally found it, we did the equivalent of "just sticking out heads in" before we turned around and hailed a taxi. We were both a little less enthused about the Luxembourg Gardens after all that lost walking. So we went back to the hotel to rest up for our Montmarte adventure.
I actually didn't rest, I went to the mall beneath the Louvre, which isn't really a mall, more like one hallway of a mall. I was on a mission to buy the cute little purse that the Versailles tour guide had, but when I found it in the store, I didn't want to spend $200 on a little hipster purse, so I said goodbye and went back to the hotel.
We went back up to Montmarte to get our paintings, and we both ended up with different paintings then we set out to get, but they are still beautiful.
We ate at the same little restaurant from our first night in Montmarte, because why mess with perfection? I wanted more of the wine (Sacurre) and mom wanted more of the Opera Cake.
We ended our evening with a taxi drive by of the Eiffel tower at midnight, right before it started sparkling. We didn't know if we were going to make it before the sparkles started, but we were right on time because when they started we could see the tower behind the trees as we were driving and when we got there, the taxi driver drove us around and around until it stopped. We even had a soundtrack... Our taxi driver was listening to a Tracy Chapman CD... "Drivin', drivin' in my car... speed so fast..."
This was probably the best sighting of the Eiffel tower the whole time we were in Paris, it had the perfect amount of adventure, the perfect amount of wine and the perfect amount of excitement.
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