05.27.05
Down, Up, Down
Friday, May 27, 2005 11:45 PM
Paris, France
Got up this morning thinking I would walk over to the Tour Eiffel but ended up spending most of the morning trying to debug why GeekRoar.com went down (as I write this it is still down, and since I am not at home I don’t know if the server died or what is going on). After I gave up (there is only so much you can do remote) I walked over to the Jardin du Luxembourg where I spent some time ambling then down to the Place de St. Sulspice and to the Rue de l’Université.
Lunch was at Vins et Terroirs an awesome little restaurant (the best yet in Paris) on Rue St. André des Arts near Boulevard st. Germain and Boulevard st. Michel. I had a beef stew in a red wine sauce. We shared lunch with Clara, a language teacher from Vashon Island in Seattle. I liked Clara a great deal and envy her traveling from country to country and learning languages.
After lunch (and our post-lunch nap of course) we went to a theater to watch The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004), not a very good movie but oddly appropriate to the history/museum lifestyle. We went from the theater to the Place d’Italy, which was a curios experience since I had been through the plaza many times but always underground via Metro tunnels. We did a bit of shopping then took a bus to Basilique du Sacré-Coeur atop Montmartre. Montmartre is the party part of town where the Moulin Rouge is located and people walk around wearing very little. The steps in front of the church had a lot of people having fun and two locals playing guitars and leading the tourists in big group songs. After the church we had dinner at one of the local restaurants ‘Ma Cuisine’ where I had my first bad meal in Paris. The food was not terribly bad but the service left something to be desired and sitting next to the bar I could not believe my eyes when I saw the bartender pour un-drunk wine from a glass back into the bottle. We also got another example of snotty Parisian attitude, this time from a taxi driver who refused to drive us up to Montmartre because he figured the distance was too short (we got a ride from another cab driver, this time a non-Parisian and I can assure you the distance was far from short).
