Paris was the last stop for our grand European adventure and it involved the most complex travel logistics. We left Dinant in the afternoon on August 8 and had to go back to Brussels to catch the Thalys Train that would take us on to Paris. That was smooth and we enjoyed the comfort, novelty, and efficiency of the high speed train just like we had when we had gone from Amsterdam to Brussels at the start of our trip. We had a little time to kill in Brussels before we departed for Paris so we decided to try out the luggage storage rental locker- not necessarily because we had to but because it seemed like a good tool to try out for future European adventures. (It was handy but somewhat pricey and luckily played nicely and gave me my luggage back when we were ready to retrieve it.)
To kill time we went outside the Brussels train station and walked around the area. And very quickly returned right back to the station. The train station is in a very sketchy area of town and many of the buildings were condemned and “housed” a large homeless population. While making our way back to the restaurants around the train station we had our first scary interaction with a bad actor. Scott had done his research leading up to the trip about the various ways scam artists and pickpockets operate, and while I don’t think this particular whacko was trying to rob us it was still scary and I was glad that Scott was with me. The guy came at us from across the sidewalk and tried to bump into Scott who was ready and deflected him. We ducked inside one of the nearby restaurants and decided to kill time that way and to stay off the streets. We enjoyed some last Belgian beers and some dinner before making our way back into the station to fetch the luggage and board our train.
Once we got into Paris it was nearly 10 pm and I was thankful that my travel buddy was so adept at using Google maps to navigate us around because once we exited the high speed train station we then had a good distance to go still to get to our hotel. The train station is in a rough area and luckily it was just a short walk and a short wait for the bus that would take us to the 5th arrondissement (neighborhood) where our room in the Libertel Austerlitz Jardin des Plantes awaited us. We rode the bus without incident and arrived safely at the hotel and checked in without incident.
Even though it was late, I insisted we shower since we had been on so many forms of public transportation that day and Scott begrudgingly agreed. (People germs creep me out.) This was a pretty average sized room and the only interesting thing about it was that the shower was on a raised platform without any sort of handrail so getting in and out required you to be very careful so wet and naked you didn’t wipe out and bust your naked head open on the slick tile floor.
By the next morning we were well rested and refreshed and ready to tackle the city of Paris. Our plan for the day was to get tickets for the Hop-On Hop-Off bus to get a lay of the land and hit all the highlights. We decided that just for kicks we should try out a McDonalds. We popped into the one that was just a block away from our hotel and discovered that all ordering had to be done from the computer kiosk. We spent a solid 2o minutes fighting with the machine to be able to select coffee, and finally after we were both irritated enough with it Scott went to find a human to inquire about this lack of coffee because… how could they not have coffee? This was France after all! Well, it turns out that their coffee machine was broken and that’s why it wasn’t an option. The kiosk automatically disallowed the ordering of it when the machine was down but didn’t convey that to the user. Luckily there seemed to be a McDonalds on every street corner just like at home so we found another one. (They gave out potty coins for you to be able to use their restroom and we pocketed our unused one in case I needed it later.)
After our breakfast at McDonald’s we walked a ways towards Notre-Dame and located one of the HOHO stops and bought our tickets. (In preparation for the 2024 summer Olympics that Paris is hosting, Notre-Dame was being worked on around the clock to repair it after parts of it burned in 2019. It was amazing the amount of work that had already been done and the amount of manpower devoted to its repair.) I had done HOHO buses before in big cities (Barcelona and Toronto) but this was Scott’s first time. I was nervous about what he would think because he usually eschews en masse tourist attractions designed for the slovenly and lazy in favor of extreme and human powered adventure. It turns out, he loved it! Neither one of us truly understood how spread out and big Paris is until our bus ride so this was a perfect way of hitting the important landmarks and getting a lay of the land.
From the double-decker comfort of our HOHO bus we were able to see and learn about the following Paris icons: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Champs-Élysées, and the Arc de Triomphe. We enjoyed seeing block after block of iconic Parisian book sellers (bouquinistes) that deal their old books, vintage posters, engravings, and artwork from their Seine-side permanent wooden boxes. I wished we would have had more time to peruse the offerings and could have found a print that spoke to us. After our initial scouting of the city, we took another spin on the HOHO to get off at the locales that piqued our interest. (We opted out of going up inside the Arc, the Tower, or going inside any museums because there were such long lines. We didn’t want to spend our whole time in Paris standing in line. Maybe next time, and only if we go during an off-peak month.)
Scott wanted to play Frogger and run across 84 lanes of roundabout traffic to get to the Arc de Triomphe but I kept a tight leash on him and made him use the pedestrian tunnel under the roundabout so we would arrive alive. The traffic zipping, zooming, and orbiting around the Arc was astounding and to this day I still have no idea how drivers navigate it without having massive multi-car pile ups because of both the sheer volume, but also the lack of lanes. We did watch a few groups of people dart out into the traffic circle, witnessed no casualties thankfully, and watched a Parisian cop tell people to get back out of the road and use the pedestrian tunnel.
We spent some time around the Eiffel Tower and the people watching was interesting. The tower did not initially impress either of us (don’t tell any French people) but we would change our minds the next night when we took a night time cruise on the Seine and were treated to the Tower light show that happens every hour after dark. The unsanctioned street vendors that roved around peddling their wares, or worse, set up their tacky Chinese Eiffel Towers souvenirs on a towel right in the middle of the sidewalk, were irritating. So much so that Scott kept threatening to kick the haphazard display of knick-knacks if he found them set up in his path. So that meant I had to continue to keep him on a tight leash to avoid that scenario.
Bathrooms, or more accurately, the lack of readily available public bathrooms, was a whole thing and I don’t want to derail this post by hashing out all the issues I have with how Paris handles its pee, but suffice it to say that they are: hard to find, there are not enough of them, you have to pay to use them once you do locate one, and are ridiculously manned (or womanned?) by an attendant whose sole job is to collect payment for the use of the facilities. Madame Pee-Pee is a real occupation in Paris. What is the city going to do when they host the Olympics?
See, I totally derailed this blog post and I am complaining about European bathrooms again. I didn’t want that to happen but here we are. Some research says that Paris has the most public restrooms of any city in the world, and to that, I say BS. If they do, I am not sure where they were hiding them while we were visiting. Well, look at their lovely and technologically advanced Sansinettes that the city offers Janna! France’s rendition of the porta-potty, the yurt-like Sansinette, are the most over-the-top ridiculous solution to public bathroom facilities that a city could come up with, but here we are. I’ll address that in the next post.
But I digress. I don’t want you to think that I spent the whole trip complaining about the bathroom situation, because I didn’t. Only about half of it. Scott can vouch for that.
Anyways, after spending much too long waiting in line to use the bathroom at McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées only to find out that my token that I had snagged earlier that morning from the Notre-Dame McDonald’s wouldn’t work and having to pay actual money to use the toilet, we were ready to venture back to our end of town to have dinner and go back to the hotel. We picked a cafe with indoor/outdoor street seating and were immediately reminded that smoking in restaurants is still legal here. Scott also had to use our water bottles to go fetch tap water from the toilette so we would actually have something to drink (we weren’t making the mistake of paying for sparkling water again, no matter how much I love my La Croix and Perrier). We realized that Paris’ solution to bathrooms is that by limiting everyone’s water intake, you also limit their subsequent pee output. Voila! Problem solved.
Sidenote: The hydration and bathroom issue were a real issue though. We both are used to drinking lots of water throughout the day and feel so much better when hydrated but between the lack of bathrooms, as well as lack of suitable places to refill water bottles, we were both chronically dehydrated throughout the trip.
Anyways, dinner was ok (we shared a pizza) even though the service was slower than the line at a Parisian Sansinette which I know, I know, is a European thing. We decided to push our Seine night cruise to the next night because we were spent, and we went back to our hotel, showered, and tumbled into bed.
