Day 5 - OAM - Wednesday, 10 June 2015 - Paris

Breakfast in Paris was the pits. We headed downstairs thinking that we would have a similar breakfast as in London but this hotel only offered a continental breakfast which consisted of the greenest bananas I've ever seen (hate green bananas), corn flakes, OJ, milk, and a Nescafe machine (they eventually brought in a 2^nd Nescafe machine). On the table were 3 baskets with baguettes, croissants, and chocolate croissants. There was no protein to be found anywhere. The croissants in London were better than in Paris! C'est la vie!

We headed for Montmartre which took quite a while to get to due to traffic and the fact that the hotel was located so far from the main city. The last time Seth and I had visited Paris, we stayed at the Disneyland hotel and took the train into the city each morning which took about 40 minutes. The Saphir hotel was even further out than Disneyland. For this entire trip, Voyageurs did not allow us to use the metro, underground trains, or subways.

We arrived near the base of Montmartre at around 11:30 pm. We had only a couple of hours to spend here. We walked up towards Sacre Couer and passed the aforementioned variety of con artists and gypsies and went up the stairs. 

We walked past the Sacre Couer and made our way down the artist's alley looking for somewhere to eat. We settled on a nice Parisian sidewalk bistro and enjoyed a rather nice (somewhat) leisurely lunch opting for their 3 course meal for 19 Euros and a bottle of really good Bordeaux. I was so happy to be able to have my favorite French dish: foie gras. Amina and I tried the beef tartare and then, for dessert, an apple tart. We didn't have much to time to shop after lunch. We did make a quick stop in the church before heading back down the stairs to meet up with the group.

We took a bus tour of some other sights around Paris and made a quick stop at a place to view the Eiffel Tower near the Champs Elysees. 

They had explained to us last night at the orientation that there would be a strange procedure for the adults to enter the Louvre. I guess Voyageurs couldn't buy the adults tickets along with the student's tickets so they purchased full price adult tickets for us. The catch was that the group could use the group bag check into the museum which was much faster than the regular bag check so the adults had to look like we were part of the group (wear our purple backpacks) but once we passed through bag check, we couldn't use our adult tickets if we were part of a group so we had to hide or ditch our purple backpacks. I handed my purple pack to Amina while Seth folded up and put his bag in his pocket. It was the weirdest procedure but it did get us through faster than the hordes of other people at the Louvre.

The coordinators recommended that we try to see the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, Mona Lisa, and Napoleon's apartment so we navigated our way around the museum to see just these things. Now, what we didn't know was that we were on the ground floor and it took a few wrong turns to figure out the orientation of the map. We doubled back a few times and finally found each piece of art. The museum was crowded but not horrible. It was warm, though. We had just enough time to finish seeing all 4 of those items before we had to be back to meet up on the bus. We did stop at the museum ATM to get some more Euros (1 Euro = about $1.34 USD) and then picked up some macaroons before getting back on the bus.

Dinner was at Le Saulnier again and this time we remembered to try the escargot. This was the first time that we have ever been served escargot still in their shells. They were ok but I thought we had had better before. More than a few times, the escargot shells (with and without the snails in them) ended up on the floor. The escargot tongs were difficult to use. We had chicken cordon bleu which reminded me of chicken fried chicken with ham and cheese in the middle. It was pretty good. The chocolate dessert I really didn't care for.

After dinner, the buses took us to the River Seine for an evening cruise. It was a nice evening but another late one as we didn't make it back to the hotel until after 10 pm.   

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