Paris Journal 2002

The city did a great job.  I wish I had more pics to show you, but the crowd was so thick through the main part of the "beach" that I could not take photos.  These, at left, were taken after we'd walked beyond the middle of the project.  Here, we were on the right bank, across from Ile St. Louis.   The thickest crowds were behind us, across from the Ile de la Cité (where Notre Dame is located).

In some places, tons of beach sand had been installed.  Huge planter boxes with palm trees were interspersed along the way.  Transats (beach chairs) could be rented.   All of them were indeed rented and occupied.

We were surprised by some folks dressed up as enormous spiders.  So I whipped out the camera, and wouldn't you know, one of the spiders came right up to me and got in my face.  I just laughed and said, "hello, sweetheart."

As evening began to grow dim, we walked across the bridge to Ile St. Louis, an ancient part of Paris whose narrow, mysterious streets have inspired many writers. 

We had started our walk from the apartment -- walking the full length of rue de l'Université and rue Jacob in order to get to the heart of Paris Plage.  This route takes us from the relatively recent (late 19th century) 15th arrondisement over to the ancient part of left-bank Paris where all the old universities, dating back to the 12th century, are or were located.  We walked by hundreds of enchanting shops, mostly closed on Sundays, and into an older, crumbling, haunted and beautiful part of the city.

So we'd been walking for hours.  After our calm stroll through the dark streets of Ile St. Louis, we made our way over the bridge to the familiar left bank, where we caught the Métro back to our immediate neighborhood and had a relaxing, late dinner in the open front window of our local Moroccan resto, Le Tipaza. 

Since Sunday we haven't done much except work.  On Monday, I managed to order train tickets to go to Champagne country where we will meet up with friends from Germany on August 10-11.  The people who work for the SNCF railroad, as well as anyone else who deals with tourists, are supposed to know English.  But they don't, often, and I used mostly French on the phone to order the tickets.  Normally, that would be easy, but we are planning to go to a relatively obscure village. L'Epine.  I doubted that the village would have a train station, and I guessed about what nearby town would. (Chalons-en-Champagne).  I guessed correctly.  But the whole thing wasn't easy.  

To begin with, I had to call three different phone numbers before I got the right one.  The one listed in the new France Telecom phone book is not correct.   Which reminds me -- one day a couple weeks ago, I received four phone calls for wrong numbers in one day.  Two days later, I read in Le Parisien that France Telecom had a computer glitch that misdirected tens of thousands of calls.  Now I can say "Désolée, vous avez le faux numero" without hesitation.

All of this may be why they tell American tourists to get their train tickets before they leave the States.  It isn't because you get a better price, necessarily.  It is just that you don't have to go through this kind of hassle.

But the woman who finally was able to reserve our tickets on the phone was very nice and helpful.  She was patient and repeated things for me until I understood her questions.  I asked if there were any discounts, and indeed she gave us a 25 percent discount.

I could have asked to have the tickets delivered for free.  But I would have worried if they didn't come for  awhile, so we elected to walk over to the train station, with our reference code for our reservation, to pay for and pick up the tickets.  The huge Gare Montparnasse is the closest to our apartment.  The ticket windows are many, and most are reserved for people travelling that day from that station.  We finally found the right windows to use and when we got there, our transaction went smoothly and quickly -- much quicker and easier than for those who were in the line in front of us.