Tour de France, Petit Palais (again), Bizarre Reminiscences and Notre Dame's Crypte Archeologique

This was the final day of the Tour de France. Predictably, we could not visit the Petit Palais the next day, so we fought our way out of the metro station onto the Champs Elysées to join in with the festivities briefly.

That last picture is of me waiting a few minutes for them to change the receipt roll so I could buy souvenir water bottles.

With the streets cordoned off, it was not clear how one got to the Petit Palais without a Tour ticket. I asked a policeman who directed us round the back on what could easily have turned out to be a wild goose chase. The place was swarming with police and associated vehicles.

I found a ribbon that appeared to be the last frontier between us and the museum, and after asking again a policewoman lifted the tape and let us through.

The benefit of going to all this trouble was that the museum was quiet and a pleasant visit ensued, even if it was awfully hard work getting tickets to the permanent collection and not to the special exhibition also!

I’ve already blogged the museum in-depth here, so it will suffice to confirm that we actually went by means of this photo.

He likes glass.

Heading across the Pont Alexandre III for the bus, we nearly fell victim to the common shiny-find scam, but resisted admirably. Said scammer looked awfully disappointed, especially as he had approached someone who was, bizarrely, able to cheerfully confirm that said shiny-find was gold. Perhaps if one genuinely found such a shiny-find one would not be so keen to hand it over for a couple of euros.

Moving on.

We hopped on a bus to Saint Michel where we had agreed to meet Meg and all headed over to the Greek place she and I had discovered with Kenny our first week. Thankfully, I had marked it on my map then, as even with that assistance it took us a while and we were nearly kidnapped by a dancing man in a sombrero en route.

It was as good as we remembered and provided fuel for Meg who proceeded to soliloquise about my apparently freakish good memory, before testing it with the very odd question, “What was it you said about naked men?” This is, undoubtedly, the most alarming thing she has ever come out with.

As we painstakingly reconstructed, it turned out that the exact phrase was, “Yeah, where are the naked men?” in helpful conclusion to Meg’s neo-feminist rant in the Musée d’Orsay about equality in post-1800 art. Of course, she got away with it while my single contribution was overheard by a shocked group of American ladies in matching hats, none of whom would see ninety again. You can’t take her anywhere. In my defence, I had just escaped death by revolving door.

Before we moved on, we popped round the corner into St Severin again, which was still pretty.

After lunch we visited the Crypt Archeologique under Parvis Notre Dame, which contains the excavated remains of the Île de la Cité’s hunchback-era community. This includes the house of Nicholas Flamel and the Foundling’s Hospital, where I got very irritated with the nuns who refused to look after babies until St Vincent-de-Paul baptised them.

The museum, which began with a look at the development of Paris through the ages, was interesting – indeed, Meg wasn’t wrong when she said it would have made a good early visit – but incredibly hot. We were all dripping by the time we left, and I mean that literally.

Being pretty sapped by all that, we parted from Meg and walked a bit further across the river, where we passed the Paris Plage, the beach on the quai made from trucked-in sand.

Then we passed the Hotel de Ville.

Back on the metro, I decided to take us by a scenic route. Or rather, the scenic route, as there aren’t many. We came above ground at Bastille, to see where the canal feeds into the Seine, then joined line 2 which goes above ground for a few stations in north eastern Paris. I wanted to see the Egyptian-tiled cinema at Barbes-Rouchouart again, so of course a train was passing us at the time. I’m honing a feeling of cosmic persecution as I feel it may serve me well, artistically.