Part 3 of our Spring 2024 travel adventures brings us to the City of Lights — Paris, France. This is Bob’s first time in France, while Carolyn has been there on business with little time to experience the sights, sounds and tastes of French culture. Paris, also often called the City of Love, features fabulous art museums, exquisite dining as well as continual motion that often feels like chaos to uninitiated visitors. Adding to the chaos is Paris’ preparation for the 2024 Summer Olympics.
The narrow streets of Paris are clogged — vehicles that are pedal powered provide product delivery and mail delivery is done by hand push carts. Delivery by bike or push cart is a sensible solution on narrow streets with overwhelming foot and vehicle traffic.
Exacerbating the very busy traffic situation is the preparation for this year’s summer Olympics. There is construction everywhere, including in the Metro lines — as we personally discovered.
On our first day, we had a four-hour private tour of the city center of Paris with Jean-Jacques, a volunteer host from Paris Greeters. Paris Greeters is a nonprofit group of Parisian volunteers, who love to show their city to visitors interested in history and architecture. Jean-Jacques’ love of his city was apparent in his narration.
It been Bob’s lifetime dream to trace the roots of his Leneway ancestors. After our 2017 visit to Salt Lake City’s Family Heritage Library, he was able to trace the Leneway ancestry back to 1682 to Ile de la Cite’, an island in the middle of Paris under the shadow of the Notre Dame Cathedral. As Bob‘s ancestors migrated to Montreal and then to Michigan, his name Leneway was anglicized from the French spelling of Lanoix.
According to Jean-Jacques, this is an example of how a street looked when Bob’s 12-generation-ago great-grandfather strolled on it in 1592 before leaving for Canada.
Rue Saint Jacques is one of the oldest streets in Paris. Imagine what it would have been like to live on the island in 1692. It was on an island in the middle of the Seine River in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral — muddy streets, towering horsemen, and sewage thrown for upper balconies included.
Restaurants and bars are everywhere, but one struck our fancy. We came upon a lovely old restaurant, where the coat of arms indicated it was founded in 1594. Could this have been a Lanoix watering hole? We can only imagine….
Remnants of ancient architecture are everywhere. This is what is left from a wall built by the Romans on the island as part the construction of their town, named Lutetia, that dates back to the 3rd century BC. Lutetia was settled by a Celtic tribe after the conquest of the territory of Gaul which included today’s France. Letitia derives from the Celtic root Lut which means “swamp” or “mud” — well representing the conditions found at that time. The appeal of the location to the Celts, of course, was access to the river Seine.
In 1682, Bob’s ancester, Louis Enouille-Dautrèpe dit Lanoix, was born on the island, ile de La Cite’, in the middle of the Seine river in the center of Paris, France. At the age of 17, he was recruited along with his brother, Jacque, to help establish the new French settlement of Montreal, Canada.
If you visit the old part of the city of Montreal, you can still stay at the Filles du roi (Daughters of the King) Inn. This Inn was built to house poor young women from Paris that the King of France shipped to Montreal to help populate Quebec. The inn was run by an order of nuns, who served as chaperones and matchmakers, to provide the French settlers with wives.
Saturday night of our week was Paris’ first 80 degree day of 2024. A visit to a highly recommended restaurant, La Marine, was an opportunity to see how Parisians enjoyed the outdoors and good weather. La Marine is located near the Canal Saint Martin, where hundreds of young people were “tail gating” with beer and wine bottles while they sat on the canal’s edge. Many others filled every restaurant seat available.
This first warm day of Spring brought Parisian youth into the streets to party, and party they did.
Earlier that same day, we toured the three most popular museums in Paris, including the Musée d'Orsay, l'Orangerie and, of course, the Louvre — this overload of fabulous art treasures was on Bob’s plan on the same day because they were “located close to each other”(dah!).
l'Orangerie is famous because it permanently houses eight large Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet. The two circular rooms were built especially for his work. He offered to these paintings to the French State following the WWI armistice of November 11, 1918 as a symbol of peace. Their installation was in 1927 after his death, but beautifully exemplifies his painting of water lilies for nearly 30 years.
The Orsay was built in 1900 as a railway station but remodeled as a museum that opened in 1986. The fabulous Orsay contains the world’s best collection of impressionist and post-impression art by artists such as van Gogh, Monet, Gauguin, and Renoir among others. This was our favorite museum of the trip. From the dense crowds we encountered there, we suspect it is many others’ favorite museum.
The photos below show some memorable art works — Monet’s water lilies paintings on the circular walls in the l'Orangerie; the Van Gogh self-portrait in the ‘Orsay; and the Mona Lisa in the massive Louvre Museum (along with hundreds of other art lovers).
Using public transportation we traveled to the city of Versailles which is 18 kilometers west of Paris. The Palace of Versailles is a former royal residence commissioned by King Louis XIV. In 1682 this rural Palace became the official Court and government center of France. A succession of kings lived in the palace up until the French Revolution. In 1789 the French revolution forced Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, to leave Versailles for Paris. Both were subsequently executed for treason by beheading in 1793. The death of Louis XVI represented the end of centurys-long rule of France by the monarchy.
The Palace of Versailles contains 2,300 rooms spread over 680,000 sq. ft. The 60,000 works of art tell the chronological history of France from the middle ages to the late 19th century. With 16,000,000 visitors a year, it is the largest tourist attraction in the world. It felt like most of them were there when we were! With our pre-purchased Paris museum pass, we bypassed hundreds of people waiting in the rain to walk right in.
The most important room in the Queen‘s Apartment is the Queen‘s bedchamber in which three different queens birthed 19 royal children and all three died here. A Queen was rarely alone in this room as she attended by many courtiers and received her visitors here — as well as the King. A secret passage led from the queen’s bed chamber to the king’s bed chamber using a secret door that was positioned to the left of the wall in this picture. The last time Marie Antoinette used this secret passage was to escape to King Louis XVI’s bedchamber as they made their escape back to Paris while the peasants of the rebellion broke into the Palace and killed the residents.
Culturally, Parisian society differed fairly significantly from the US. As we stood in line for the “toilettes,” we joined both men and women waiting for a stall and then hand-washed together afterwards. This sign indicated how the facilities were designated.
Men often wore man-purses and dressed much more colorfully than US men. Women have ditched, skinny pants and many wore very baggy, loose fitting, and in Carolyn’s estimation not very attractive slacks. Paris is also called the City of Love, and almost everywhere, we would see young and old couples holding hands and kissing in public..
As a side note, in both France and Italy, toilettes could be a long way apart, and we quickly learned not to pass one up — we never knew when we would find another one. Each visit cost 1 Euro to use it.
The Paris metro was quick, reliable and convenient after learning how to use the system. However, there were two exceptions that came at the most inopportune times.The first occurred when we had dinner and show reservations at the Moulin Rouge. Halfway there the train stopped and everyone was told to get off. Pre-Olympic construction had just begun on this stretch of track and we had a long way to go to reach the theatre. Outside the Metro exit, a young man told us it was a twenty minute walk, but that we should only walk on the right side of the street for safety reasons. We walked for 40 minutes through a chaotic Arab neighborhood, with many men standing around the food vendors’ booths and animatedly talking with other men on the street. It was Sunday night about 5:45 PM and we rarely saw a woman on the street.
Eventually we found the continuation of Metro line that took us the rest of the way to the Moulin Rouge. It was our estimation that it would’ve taken us another 30 to 40 minutes of walking to get to the theater. Finding a cab did not seem to be in the cards, as there were none to be found in this neighborhood. It was not a typical tourist destination!
As the last patrons in line to check in, we were taken to a front row seat. This location did not give us the panoramic view of the stage production, but we were so close to the dancers that we could’ve reached out and touched their ankles. The female dancers’ feathered wings swung by Carolyn‘s head regularly as they danced. The costumes were colorful, dramatic and the female dancers sported very large.headdresses. Costume changes occurred with every musical score.
The second time the metro let us down is on our way to a 7 a.m. Normandy bus tour pickup, when the train suddenly stopped. An announcement in French came on that we did not understand. We noticed that and everyone was leaving. A police man was waving at us to leave and said to “take the bus.” We emerged from the metro but found no bus. What we did see was the Arc de Triomphe. This was a sight that was not on our planned stops. Later, we heard that someone had left a back pack at an earlier stop on the train, which made it a bomb scare.
The Arc de Triomphe was a long way from the bus pickup point and time was running out. We were able to hail a cab from the traffic circle that delivered us to the bus just before the 12-hour trip to Normandy began. Normandy proved to be a memorable and emotional experience for us. More about that trip in the next blog posting.
Lessons Learned
Lesson 1. What might sound doable from an Internet article on “How to visit Paris in Five Days” is not doable for a first-time visitor also learning the transportation systems, the language and the customs — and was probably written by a 20-year-old on speed.
Lesson 2. It’s Ok to not see everything, save it for next time.
Lesson 3. When in Paris, always look everywhere for a wild bicyclist, they are out to get you.
Lesson 4. Credit cards could be used for large purchases and meals. A service charge (tip) was usually included in the restaurant bill under various names.
Lesson 5. We needed euros to buy from street vendors, at the very small shops and to use the toilettes. Be sure to have 1 euro coins. For toilettes without an attendant, a 2 euro coin in the machine will not work. Thus, no pit stop.
Lesson 6. During self-planned trips, shit happens, embrace the chaos, and know that arguing is good for relationships.
Lesson 7. Take time to smell the cherry blossoms, dance in the rain and enjoy your three-hour dinner and the slow service that comes with it. It’s also Ok to take time to just wander about and you may be surprised by what you find.