Wednesday, April 19th, 2006.
Again, it's breakfast right downstairs at the Boulanger, and then off we went for another day of exploration in Paris! Cindy (G) experiences breakfast tea with hot milk, and REALLY likes it. I have my normal French Roast double espresso, croissant and fresh squeezed OJ, and the pain-au-chocolate for Danielle is now a permanent fixture in the morning. Cindy switches from hot chocolate to coffee with hot milk (Café au lait). Fresh fruit is also the order of the morning.
La Madeline Paris Opera Holy Trinity Gare St. Lazarre Bateaux Mouches
The Church of the Madeleine
(La
Madeleine)
The exterior of this Church is an impressive Roman columned building.
The massive doors are beautifully carved.
The marble Altar and surrounding artwork were absolutely breathtaking!
Cindy lights a candle for her Statue of
Mary.
Joan of Arc (Jean D'Arc) The organ
sounded quite
Grandmother.
impressive.
Walking around this huge structure, one realizes how important art is in this
city.
While the outside is awesome, the inside demonstrates opulence on another scale.
We chose to not take the guided tour, and the cheap seats for the evening show
were only about €150,
obviously we chose to pass on the show as well.
Next, the girls did a little shopping in the 'expensive' part of town.
Above and below are photos of 2 stores they visited. They walked into
Lafayette VO & Bouchara, while I chose to sit at a little sidewalk café and
enjoy a cool beverage of the beer sort and watch the impeccably dressed Parisian
masses walk by. The girls didn't buy anything, and exclaimed that even a
simple T-Shirt was about €40!
Church of the Holy Trinity
(Église
de la Sainte-Trinité)
Prior to the Church we stopped for lunch at a little
restaurant off the main shopping area.
Danielle & Cindy had sandwiches of ham/cheese (croque monsieur), and for me, a
sandwich with lots of grilled
veggies... Cindy (G) had her sandwich Trocadéro, and for the rest of the trip,
when we passed the Trocadéro Metro Station, she'd laugh and say, 'hey, I ate
there!' yup, she's a dweeb... <G>
The girls definitely love to stop and smell the flowers <G>... This garden
was just in front of the
Church of the Holy Trinity.
Below are pictures of the interior and exterior of the
Church of the Holy
Trinity.
It's currently having the exterior restored, however the inside was still open
for viewing!
I always loved those old pulpits!
St. Lazarre Train Station
Gare St. Lazarre
Claude Monet painted this Station several times at different times of day to
work the effect of
light on the station, the glass, and the steam engines.
The odd clock at the front Danielle plays with the birds while
Cindy and I figure out
of the Gare.
the best route to the
Bateaux Mouches tour boat.
Bateaux Mouches Seine river tour
Bateaux Mouches
The
Bateaux Mouches is one of several River Seine boat tours
of Paris.
We've taken this one before, and the audio was not recorded, it was a live tour
guide.
You asked for your language and they told you the schedule for that language.
Unfortunately, now they use an audio tape. The positive, multiple
languages repeated, one after another.
Informative, but no personality compared to the old tour guided rides.
These photos may not be in exactly the correct order. I've tried to take
the 'best' photos
from everyone and make one boat photo montage. Besides, we traveled up one
end of the
Seine, down the other and back again, so some shots could have been from either
direction.
The American Church
in Paris.
Pont Alexandre
III
Eiffel Tower
Three more images of the
Pont Alexandre
III. The left and right images are at the
base of the bridge.
Pont Alexandre
III Ponts XXX
& XXX
XXX
Musée d'Orsay
Musée du Louvre
Pont XXX
L'Institut de
France Tip of the Ile St. Louis
Frescoes on the
Pont Neuf
3 photos of
Notre Dame - the middle is a close-up of the statues climbing the
central spire.
The last is a good photo of the famous 'flying buttresses' of the Cathedral.
Monument at the end of Pont
Neuf
L'Institut de
France
Ile de la Cité, I think.
Entry to the Palais du Justice, (Conciergerie),
also where many
Just a good shot of steps and
beheadings happened in Paris, including Marie
Antoinette. streets off the
Seine.
Domed chapel of XXX Eiffel
Tower between two of the The original scaled model of
Towers
of the
Pont Alexandre
III. the
Statue of Liberty used to make
the one given to America.
That's what the tour said it was.
She stands at the end of the 2nd small Isle in the Seine known as
Ile de Grenelle ...
I just liked this statue at the base of the
last bridge we passed prior to re-docking.
We head back to the hotel for dinner somewhere close.
We found a funny location for dinner. We were wandering back to the hotel
via a completely different direction, and we noticed this Lebanese restaurant
with the name of Restaurant
Noura. The odd part was they had 2
store fronts with the same name, but one was the restaurant, and the other was
the bakery and patisserie (tons of Lebanese sweets)!
Danielle loved her chicken kabobs and HUGE salad, Cindy had the Vegetarian Plate
with falafel, stuffed grape leaves, baba-ganoush, etc., Cindy (G) tried the
kabob meat plate with 3 different meats, and I had the roasted lamb with extra
falafel. All of us absolutely devoured our entire servings! We had
no room for dessert!
We highly recommend this to anyone looking for a change of pace in Paris.
La Madeline Paris Opera Holy Trinity Gare St. Lazarre Bateaux Mouches
