Madeleine, Montmarte (and Sacre Coeur)

On Tuesday, we caught the metro train to Madeleine station in order to have breakfast at Fauchon patisserie, a well-known and highly regarded location - although primarily a pastry shop it is also a delicatessen selling only the finest and highest quality smallgoods.  When you come up to street level from the platform, there are actually two Fauchon stores in close proximity to one another, both very pretty in appearance, being glossy pink, black and gold.  The pastries and coffee are probably not the best in Paris, but the experience of visiting the store takes away from any significance you might place on that issue.  The intricacy of the cake decorations and the presentation of the food generally, is beyond comparison with anything I have seen elsewhere.  Simply beautiful!

We walked from Fauchon down rue Tronchet, a wide tree-lined shopping boulevard which leads to the fabled Printemps and Galeries Lafayette department stores, although we purposely did not visit either of those on Monday, wanting to save the experience for a few days until Cookie joined us.  The metro from there to Montmarte is quite direct and that was our next destination.

We have been very impressed with the metro system - it is easy to navigate, cheap to use and we have not yet had to wait more than 3 minutes for a train or a connection.  Having said that, the stations are dirty and not pleasant places to spend time.  I know that you're not supposed to spend a lot of time at railway stations, but you only have to go to a country like Japan, to Austria or to Singapore to discover that it's actually quite pleasant to be in some stations.  Paris - not so.

Montmarte is quite a different area to the one where we are staying, in the Latin Quarter.  It doesn't have the same feeling, being known most famously as the location of Moulin Rouge, cabaret and a focus of nightclub life in Paris.  We have heard good stories and not-so-good stories about that area.  Our impression was that we were glad to have chosen the Latin Quarter for our 8-day stay - it is more central, the restaurant and cafe choices are better, people walking about seem well-dressed and elegant and the tone of the area is brighter and more vibrant.  It is unwise to form an opinion about a place without more evidence than a couple of hours spent there, but I think you do "get a feel" for where your comfort level lies and anyway people look for different things in their choice of location, and people feel differently according to their own experiences.  It would be a difficult and boring world to live in, if we all liked the same things all of the time.

We took the funicular railway up to Sacre Coeur; the ride is great fun and conveniently, you can use a regular metro ticket to access the little train.  Having eaten more pastries in the past few days than I have in the past few years, it's probably fair to say that I should have walked the couple of hundred steps up the hill to the monument, but let's not go there... 

Sacre Coeur is very impressive and very beautiful; the view from the area across Paris is a bonus highlight.  Paris rooftops are very different from Italian rooftops, the latter being mostly of terracotta and affording a different overall experience.  Both are beautiful, just in different ways.

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