Ah ! Paris !

Well, actu­ally, “Brrr  Paris”,  in that there was an extraordin­ar­ily chilly little wind whist­ling up the Seine and round the Tuiler­ies and up and down the steps of the Metro (of which more anon).

Eurostar did its bit very nicely and on time — I must say St Pan­cras beats Gare du Nord for facil­it­ies, though both seem to think that Eurostar trav­el­lers have capa­cious blad­ders, in spite of all the on-station oppor­tun­it­ies provided to fill them. Oh, and at Gare Du Nord, you just walk off the train and into Paris, while arriv­ing at St. P you fol­low a cir­cuit­ous route past pass­port desks (unper­soned) and cus­toms (ditto).  I sus­pect it’s a way to make sure you pass the shops on your way out.

The Paris Metro has what seem to be quaintly old fash­ioned stock on some lines, though now all in smart green and grey liv­ery, and a num­ber of lines have the stock with sup­ple­ment­ary rubber-tyred wheels.  I have always assumed these are for faster accel­er­a­tion and decel­er­a­tion — happy to have this con­firmed if any­one knows for cer­tain.  Cité Sta­tion, on the Île de la Cité is a gem — big globe lights on eleg­antly curved brack­ets, and then the access to plat­forms is down stairs in a huge cir­cu­lar, lined with steel, hole in the ground — the guts more on dis­play than usual.

What did we do ?  Went up the Eif­fel Tower at dusk — right to the top.  Main fea­ture of Eif­fel tower apart from the view is the queues.  But worth it. Feels a bit like clam­ber­ing up the inside of the Forth Bridge must feel like — though the steel is a dif­fer­ent section.

Good res­taur­ants. “Au Roi du Pot au Feu” in Rue Vignon — huge hot pot.  “Au Lys d’Agent” on Rue St Louis en L’Isle”  — excel­lent lunch-type meals inc crêpes, and “Au Petit Bis­trot” on the Rue Mouf­fetard — again, excel­lent food on a fixed price menu.  One other place we ate provided adequate food but it didn’t seem to bear a close resemb­lance to what we had ordered — but by that time we were des­per­ate due to the time spent queuing at the Tour Eif­fel.  (Did you know, by the way, that the Eif­fel Tower comes out in sparkly very bright lights every half hour or so ? — it’s pre­sum­ably to tit­il­late the pal­ate jaded by mere floodlighting).

As we know, there are shops for everything — there’s an Elvis shop in Paris, and in a shop called “La Droguerie” you can get a mil­lion and one dif­fer­ent kinds of .…. wool !

There’s an abso­lutely huge record shop called FNAC in the Les Halles shop­ping centre — but Duss­man in Ber­lin is bet­ter, to my mind.  From the –3 floor of the Halles shop­ping you go UP a couple of storeys to the Underground.

Oh, and Monet’s water­lilies in the Oran­gerie are just stunning.