Traveling with Ray Owens

The plans for today were a bit more relaxed than the previous day.   We agreed to leave the hotel at 8:30 and take an uber to the Sacre Coeur (Sacred Heart) Church at the top of the hill in the Montmartre District of Paris.  Montmartre is the artsy district and one of the oldest arrondissements (or administrative districts) in Paris. The districts of Paris are numbered from 1 to 20 and they are in a spiral beginning at the city center where the Louvre Museum is located and going out to the edges.  In the mid 1800s Napolean the Third (the nephew of the famous hand in his coat general) commissioned Baron Haussmann to oversee the refurbishing of the medieval city of Paris.  It was this renovation that gives Paris its largely uniformed architecture and the rules that only allowed buildings that were no more than a certain height.  Thus, the center of Paris has no skyscrapers.  There was a special dispensation given to one man named Eiffel in 1889.  His tower was originally seen as a temporary building to be used as a center piece for the 1889 World’s Fair.   It was meant to be taken down after 20 years.   But it became very useful for long distant radio transmission during WW I. Of course, now the center of Paris is remarkable for having no tall buildings other than the tower.

The Sacre Coeur Church is made from a special marble that is gleaming white and has the characteristic of not staining when it gets wet.  We arrived at the church and had a little over an hour to take a walk down the hill via steps to the starting point of the 10:30 start of our pastry and sweets tour.  This walk from the top would take us a bit longer time than Google maps said the walk would take because we are old. Our allotted time in the lovely church was cut to about 5 minutes.   The church was very beautiful.

The pastry tour was pretty fabulous.  Our guide was James and his trainee was Paulette.  James is from Taiwan and Paulette is a Parisian.   They gave us some history of this region of Paris and guided us from one shop to another.   At each shop, James would purchase a specialty treat for us to sample.  We had croissants, cream puffs, chocolate candies, macarons and 2 other delights.  It was a very pleasant time.

At the end of the tour, we took an uber back to the top of the hill (no way we were going to make that reverse trek) to the arts square where Jen conversed with her fellow kindred spirits.  She was in heaven talking to the lady that paints chickens as she is also a bird painter.  We ate lunch there at a sidewalk café and were serenaded by a street performer.  It was fun.

Our next event was to go and tour the Palais Garnier Opera House.   It was a magnificent building.   The actual auditorium was not open but the grand staircases and fabulous ceilings and the Great Hall where you probably could hold a chariot race if you were of a mind to do so.  (A slight exaggeration, perhaps.)

After we all oohed and aahed at the Opera House we made our way across the street to the Galeries Lafayette Department Store.  It is 6 stories high and a huge city block in area. It is 750,000 square feet of shopping location. My good friend Alan Holliman put us onto this store.  On the 6 story there is a cafeteria that serves okay food at reasonable prices.  Only a few of us tourist folks were there.  The rest were Parisian shoppers.  The Piece de Resistance was the roof terrace where you can walk around and get a bird’s eye view of the city and its surrounds.  The store is located on one of the tallest hills in the city and thus you are higher than most other buildings.  It was a good place to see the lovely city.  We left the department store about 5:00 and the uber we ordered took a while to arrive at our location, but we made it home.

Tomorrow three of us are tackling the Louvre and 5 of us are going to the public rehearsal of the ballet company.  The only ballet performance scheduled in the time we were here.

Another good day!