Paris - the First Two Days

We arrived on Wednesday evening and haven't stopped moving since then.  Our rental apartment in the Latin Quarter is exactly as advertised (which is always comforting) - three rooms, well appointed, and even two outside areas to sit and contemplate how lucky we feel to be in Paris, again.  Last time we were here for a fairly quick visit of five days,  so it's good to be more relaxed this time.  Having said that, we pre-organised lots of things to do and have hit the ground running.

Wednesday evening after having a quick tour of the apartment, we immediately locked the door behind us and went to sit in an outdoor bar for wine, cheese and charcuterie.  After a couple of hours of soaking up some warmth (it had been very cold in Copenhagen, but we arrived to high 20s here), we followed our wine and cheese with a wander down the gorgeous Mouffetard, lined with small restaurants and lively outdoor cafes, indulging in a couple of traditional crepes with Nutella and sliced banana.  Crazy.  We rolled home and fell asleep within minutes, ready for our first real day in Paris.

Yesterday was Day One. A visit to the ever-spectacular Notre Dame Cathedral (and a side-trip to the utterly superb stained glass windows of the two-level Sainte Chapelle) was followed by a very sobering experience.  While tens of thousands of tourists are crawling through the cathedral, tucked away behind it is the Mémorial des Martyres de la Déportation - a tribute to the 200,000 Jewish people (a huge proportion of them children) deported to concentration camps from Vichy France.  It is an underground memorial, stark and haunting, a place for tears and quiet contemplation, reminding us of one of the darkest episodes in human history.  

Above are photos of Notre Dame, including one of the magnificent rose windows.

Photos cannot do justice to the magnificence of the stained glass windows of the Sainte Chapelle chapel.  Coming up the stairs from the ground floor to the upper level totally took our breath away.

Below are two photos from the memorial to the Jews deported to Auschwitz and other camps during the Second World War. In the second photo can be seen 200,000 glass beads lining the walls of a section of the memorial.

In the afternoon we did a walking tour of the Marais district.  It's an area which fell out of favour during the 1960s when no-one was interested in living there, and is now seriously hot real estate property that's impossible to buy into.  The tour was run by a company called Paris Walks - appealingly, you don't have to book and the tours are on a rotation schedule throughout the week, so if it's Thursday afternoon, it's the Marais.  Inexpensive at €12, English-only and filled with humour and anecdotes about the area.  We might do another one of the Latin Quarter on Sunday.

We rested briefly at home after that, in preparation for our very special evening out - dinner at Le Train Bleu.  I'll let the photos speak for themselves, now.