4 posts tagged “france”
As I mentioned yesterday, today we would leave our tour group, people who we travelled with in the last 21 days. We woke up a lot earlier than we had to so that we could say goodbye to the group before they left the hotel to England. It was an emotional farewell and few tears were unavoidably shed.
After bidding our friends goodbye, we moved to our new hotel that was right next to the Louvre. The hotel was very small and the elevator could only hold two people at a time. It took us a while to transport all our suitcases up into our rooms. The highlight of the day was of course the Louvre. Once we got the tickets, our friends and us decided to split up and we would meet again 3 hours later. Once again, it just showed how much we underestimated how fast time flies when you are in a high quality museum like the Louvre. We eventually spent more than 6 hours in the Louvre and we left only because the museum had to close at 6:00pm.
The Louvre is so big, there is absolutely no way to explore the whole building and see everything in one day. It is said that if you spend one minute on each of the exhibit and keep doing it for 8 hours a day, it would take you four months to finish the whole museum. The museum also understands this and it produced a list of "highlight" or "must-see" items on the museum map to assist people to get the most out of their short visit to the museum. At the top of the list is Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. It is a surprisingly small canvas and is constantly surrounded by visitors. Opposite to Mona Lisa is a gigantic canvas that depicts Jesus in some kind of event. Judging from the size of the crowd in front of this canvas, it must be something significant. I thought to myself "we made all the way to the Louvre but now I don't even know what I am looking at.". And that's when we decided to get an audio guide to help us understand and appreciate all these invaluable art and historic collections around us.
That night we meet some family friends of our friends and had dinner in a local brasserie. The dinner taught me a lot about the eating culture of the French and tried few traditional French dishes like goose liver paste and steak tartare. After dinner we went to the Place de la Concorde to take few more photos. For the first time, the whole landmark belonged to us and we didn't have to fight with other tourists for the best photo spot.
As we were having a relaxing walk under the stars in Paris. I suddenly realised that we haven't really had any relaxing walk in Europe until now. We were always in a rush when travelling with the tour but now we can choose our own pace.
The sad thing is we are almost at the end of our European tour.
Finally, we are here! Today is our last day with our tour and tomorrow we will stay behind in Paris while the rest of the group continue the journey back to London. Our tour director Reiner asked us earlier whether we wanted to visit the Palace of Versaille or the Louvre. Most people wanted to see the Versaille because they thought it is much grander than the Louvre. Beside, Louvre is just a museum and it is not that exciting. Well, although we didn't agree with their reasoning, we thought it was a good move to visit the Versaille with the group, because we will be staying in a hotel right next to the Louvre tomorrow night. So why not ask the coach to take us to Versaille (which is located outside the central Paris) today and we can visit the Louvre at our own leisure tomorrow. What a cunning plan!
The construction of the Palace of Versaille was ordered by Louis XIII as hunting lodge. Louis XIV later moved in and expanded it to the world's largest palace in the world over the following decades. Some say Louis moved to Versaille because he thought the 1500-room Louvre wasn't big enough for him but I heard that it was a political move designed to distance himself from the aristocrats in Paris and once again centralise the power back to the king.
The palace is, without question, decorated lavishly with the best materials by the best craftsmen at the time using crystals, marbles, gold ,paintings, sculptures and tapestries. While all these efforts were certainly impressive, it left very little in my mind why the French revolution had to happen. It is not that hard to understand why the French people hate their king and queen so much when the king was spending huge sum of money in his house and at the same time peasants were dying from hunger outside the palace gate.
After leaving the Versaille, all female passengers on our coach were getting visibly excited. This must had something to do with the fact that we were now heading to the central Paris shopping district. The coach dropped us off just outside Galeries Lafayette, where we spent the next couple of hours in to eat and shop.
We later took a cab (it was hard to catch a cab in Paris when there were 20,000 English Rugby fans completing against you) to the world famous Champs-Élysées, where we found a huge Louis Vuitton shop, show rooms of various car manufacturers, the world's largest cosmetic shop and many, many other major brand names. Dinner was served in one of the restaurants on Champs-Élysées and we tried escargots (French snails) for the first time. All I can tell you is that they tasted better than they looked and they definitely went very well with my 1-litre beer.
We left our hotel in Bordeaux at 7:30am this morning began our long way to Paris. The first quick stop we made this morning was on the bank of Loire River. The only thing worthed reporting there is a sculpture of Leonardo da Vinci. Our tour director Reiner said Da Vinci was actually buried inside a chapel, which is inside a castle just across the river. Naturally, we didn't have time to pay him a visit because we had a very tight schedule to meet.
Lunch break was taken just outside the Château de Chambord at Chambord. The Château is famous for its very distinct French Renaissance architecture. Some suggested that it was originally designed by Leonardo da Vinci but the claim was never conclusively proven. Looking at all the tower-like structures extended from the roof of the building reminded me of the sky line of a modern city, and yet the interesting Renaissance design gave away its true origin.
May and I didn't worry too much about food when confronted by such a beautiful building in such a good weather. We went around the building to the other side to get better light for our photos (and that was when we realise how big the Château truly is). We even managed to visit the souvenir shop inside the Château. At the end we only had time to grab a sandwich before having to jump back on the coach and continue our journey to Paris.
We arrived the City of Style, Paris, in the late afternoon. I should mention here that the Rugby World Cup final match will be held in Paris tomorrow and the train driver decided that today is the best day to be on strike. The traffic in Paris is expected to be chaotic and travellers are told to expect long delay. We experienced the traffic chaos first hand: a trip from our hotel to the Eiffel Tower would normally take 15 minutes. Tonight, the same trip saw us trapped on the coach for 2 hours without food and water. The worst bit was that the sky was completely dark when we got to the tower and it made photography without tripod very difficult.
The view from the mid-level of the tower is breathtaking (the top level was closed) but I am sure it would be even better if we weren't slowed down by the traffic and got up there at sunset time.
Just like every other major tourist attractions, long queue to get up to the tower couldn't be avoided. What makes Eiffel Tower stands above the rest is that we also had to queue up to get down. In fact, we waited longer to get down the tower than we did when trying to get up. By the time we had everyone back on the ground, it was already 9:45pm. As much as our tour director wanted to take us to the Sacred Heart Basilica, all we wanted was dinner.
I had a 3-course dinner at McDonald's, completed with a pot of beer (did I mention they sell beer at McDonald's in most European cities?) and couldn't wait to go to bed.
Today is another long drive day. We left Lourdes early in the morning and made a brief stop in a small village called Aire-sur-I'Adour (I didn't make this name up. Go ahead and google it if you don't believe me). It was their lunch time when we got there and all shops, I mean all shops except one cafe, were closed. I guess it was still a good idea to get out of the coach and stretch our legs after sitting for hours. We later had our lunch in one of the best AutoGrills (motorway restaurant) we have been to in this trip. The food and the variety of the good were both very good.
Our hotel in Bordeaux is situated right next to a shopping centre. It wasn't a mega mall (more like The Glen), but it was good enough to excite a bunch of people who haven't been in any real shopping centre for days by now (the last shopping centre we went to was the one in Barcelona). We didn't really need to buy anything and the shopping centre didn't really have anything interesting to offer. But the mere sense of being inside a modern shopping centre was enough to temporarily cure our home sickness. I guess there is no use to deny that we are the typical shopping-centre generation.
The dinner in the hotel was good in quality, but not in quantity (may be we just ate too much). The dessert was also particularly disappointing. We decided to hunt for our own supper in the supermarket inside the shopping centre we went to in the afternoon. Their supermarkets are way bigger than ours and carry a lot more variety of goods. We fixed our eyes on fresh oysters and prawns and managed to buy some with our broken-Frenlish (short for French-English). One new thing we learned today is that French don't open oysters for you. I was charged with the task of opening our oysters with my trusted Leatherman. That leads me to another thing I have learned to day: It is ridiculously hard to open the shell of an oyster. I managed to open 11 out of 12 oysters we bought. It's okay. The hard work just made the oyster tasted even better.
