Palais Garnier et La Tour Eiffel

A three-hour leave pass from shopping with the girls found me on the door step of the Palais Garnier (more commonly known as the Paris Opera), and for the first time a silent "wow" escaped my lips. This is truly a maginifent building where all the attention has been placed on the lavish interior. My only regret is that I was not prepared to pay the higher entry fee for the official tour which would have included the terraced balconies and the magnificent stage. Instead I chose the cheaper do-it-yourself tour for 9 euro, and whilst being overawed with what I saw, I can't help but feel that I missed a whole lot more.

With still an hour to go on my leave pass, and no desire to enter the throngs of people who were milling around the entrance to Galeries Lafayette, I strolled into Eglise de la Trinite and joined the lunchtime crowd who had sat down in this very old and run-down church to enjoy a free recital. A single violinist supported by a cellist performed for an hour, and the acoustics were amazing.

The early evening saw us navigating the Metro once again for a visit to La Tour Eiffel. This structure is always visible on the horizon during the day. I have seen it from the dome at the Pantheon, and I have seen it from the rooftop observatory cafe at Printemps, but to see it at night changes it from just being there to dominating the night sky. It is truly amazing and no real words can describe it. Also apparent was the very lengthy queue of visitors all lined up to purchase their tickets for the ride to the upper levels for the night-time view of Paris. We chose to stay on the ground, walked over to the Trocadero, and once again I revelled in the marvels of another Nutella and banana crepe - and once again I blame Cookie.

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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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