Day 13 (Saturday 7th July)

Well the sleeper train was less fun than I thought it would be. I'm single, and not very tall, so you would think that I could sleep in a single bed without too much trouble. However I have mostly been sleeping alone in a queen size bed for twelve years now, and with the problems I have with my back have got into the habit of sleeping in a very sprawled out position. It didn't matter how much I tossed and turned I just could not get comfortable in the very narrow bunk you get on the train. To add to that I must have eating something a bit funny that day - everyone else was rugging up against the chill and complaning about the aircon, whilst I was feeling too hot and by midnight was burning up with fever. The fever settled down during the night but it left my clothes soaked with sweat. All in all it didn't make for a great nights sleep.

I got into Paris just after 9am and caught the RER (the major city railway line) straight to my hotel. I checked into my hotel and decided to go for a walk around the local area, heading straight for Jardin du Luxemburg, a huge park just across from my hotel. It was exactly what I had expected a park in Paris on a summer weekend to be. There were people picnicing on the grass in the sunshine, others sitting in groups under the trees, a crowd around a pergola listening to a classical music performance, and kids sailing toy boats on the lake. Everything you always see in the movies but don't believe really happens.

I went to brasserie for lunch which was quite nice. I got my first rude shock here - their menus didn't have the English and the waiters didn't speak much English either. I ordered by guess and hope, and whilst what I got was not what I was expecting, it was quite nice if not spectacular. Although too much french cooking is going to kill me - I had more fat in that one meal than I would in a week at home.

I spent the afternoon walking around the local area and stumbled on the Parthenon (yes I know that's supposed to be Greek but it turns out Paris has one too). It was built to be a church and was meant to be hold the remains of one of the french saints, but then the revolution happened and it became a secular burial place for national heros. The philosophers Voltaire and Rosseau are buried there, as are the authors Alexander Dumas and Victor HUgo, and some of the heros from the revolution. It has since been given back to the church, but the vaults beneat are still used to bury national heroes. Until recently this meant men, but Marie Curie has become the first woman to be buried there. It's also where Foucalt's pendulum is located - this was how Foucalt proved once and for all that the Earth spins on it's axis.

It was after 6pm when I finished there, and I'd heard that sunset was the best time to visit the Eiffel Tower, so I decided that would be the perfect way to finish off my first day in Paris. I got in line about 7.00pm, got to start climbing about 7.45pm, but that still gave me plenty of time as the sun doesn't actually go done over here until nearly 10pm. I took the stairs to the first level, spent about an hour there, took the stairs again to the second level where I stayed about half an hour, then it's an elevator ride up to the summit. I took a stroll around the full 360 degrees and then settled in at a perfect spot for the sunset and refused to budge for about 40 minutes until I got the pictures I was after. I met a nice American couple about my age whilst I was waiting and we chatted away as we waited for the sunset. It was everything I had hoped and I have squillions of photos to prove it. ;-)

After the sunset was over I had another wait for it to get dark enough for the lights to start come on around Paris. I took a few more photos and then lined up for 20 minutes for the elevator back to the 2nd level. There was a similar line up for the elevator back to the ground so I ignored that and took to the stairs again. It was after 11.30 by the time I got back to the ground and there were still people lined up wanting to start the climb.

Despite the fact that people were still streaming out of the tower by their hundreds the local busses had already stopped. Fortunately it's not too long a walk to the metro station where I headed back to the hotel, getting in about 1am.

Day 14 (Sunday 8th July)

Day Fourteen! I can't believe the trip is half over already. The time has absolutely flown by.

As you can imagine after little or no sleep the night before and getting to bed after 1 last night it was a late and reluctant start today. The cold, windy drizzle was back so I headed for a cafe for a coffee andf my first french croissant. It was horribly overpriced, and tasted no different from the croissants you can buy in Sydney (we won't discuss what you can get in Darwin), but I didn't mind as I was enjoying just sitting outside a cafe in Paris watching the world go by. The cafe turned out to be a speciality chocolate maker, and I bought a couple of chocolates to take with me. At 88 Euros ($150) a kilo I don't think I'll be buying many more, but I must say they were superb.

Despite the rain I continued walking down St Michel to the Isle de Cite and Notre Dame Cathedral. Like the churches in Berlin the cathedral is attractive at a distance, but it's not until you get up close that you really appreciate the scale of the thing> I'm not the least bit religious, but I do respect the beliefs of others and feel that if you are going to go into a place of worship from any religion that you should have the courtesy to be quiet and not interfere with the people who are trying to use it for it's actual purpose. I found it beautiful and interesting, but the degree of commercialisation bothered me a bit. Cut glass crysal crosses and music CD's complete with a listenig staion were just a bit too much. That said the church itself is magnificent, and the stained glass windows in particular.

More by accident than design (I took the wrong bridge off the island and went in the opposite direction to what I thought I was) I ended up outside the Louvre. I didn't go in as it was nearly closing time, but I did get some photos of the outside, and one of the guards told me I could avoid the queue for tickets by buying my entry ticket at the metro station rather than waiting until I got to the Louvre itself.

I tried to get the metro back from there, but the Louvre had just closed and one look at the lineup at the metro staion told me that was a bad idea. So I walked back across to the south side and got the train from the Museum d'Orsee instead. I came back to the hotel to change, and then went out to dinner at a little french bistro call Polidor. It was half full when I got there only 30 minutes after they open for the night, and within another 15 was packed to the rafters. Again I ordered off a menu that was entirely in french, and again nothing was quite what I had expected but this time round the food was excellent. My entree was a soup made from lentils and fois de gras, the main was a cold dish of cooked chicken on a bowl of white beans with a corriander sauce, and the desert was a blackberry sponge with a thickened blackberry juice as a sauce. The wine was a bit disappointing though - it was very much like the thin watery reds that in Australia are found mostly in 4 litre cardboard boxes. My biggest problem is that I am into wine tours and wine makers dinners and have a good idea of what I like - unfortunately I am too young to remember what the Australian varieties were called were called before we had to stop using the french names, so I have no idea what french variety corresponds to what Australian wine. Hopefully I'll get to do some cellar door tastings when I go to Bordeaux and will find something I like. The wine I had at the restaurant in Berlin was superb.

One thing I have started doing - when I've travelled on my own in the past I often end up with hundreds of photos with no evidence I was ever on the trip. At some stage in Germany I realised I was doing it again so now I'm making a real effort to ask someone else to take a photo of me at these places instead of just taking pictures myself.