In our earlier travels to Europe we never spent much time in Paris. This time we had six free nights at a Holiday Inn Express. Not the high end in Paris, and not the low end either. We were grateful for the free nights.
We walked or took the metro/subway everywhere. The public transportation around Paris was easy to navigate and accessible from nearly every part of the City. One-way fares were $1.90 or you could buy 10 at a time for $17. Each metro stop had kiosks to buy tickets along with a person selling tickets behind a window. At times the metro was crowded where it was hot and sweaty with a lot of various body odors from people being all jammed up breathing on each other. My grandson would say it would be a great place to fart because no one would ever know who did it. I did not attempt it, but from experience in my younger days on the metro in Washington D.C., people would just turn their heads around at look blankly at each other. It was kinda cool when you knew who the culprit was. Some people were on the metro were wearing masks. Initially I thought these people were mentally disturbed, still freaking out about COVID, but I later realized it seemed like a good idea to wear a mask on the subway. It had nothing to do with COVID.
Speaking of masks, most folks were not wearing them. However, there were a few who walked around Paris outdoors with their masks on. It seemed odd. They were outside, the wind was blowing, wearing paper masks that don’t protect from anything—maybe now they think it’s part of their every day wear.
If there was no hurry, and the distance was less than a 35-minute walk, then we walked. Europeans walk a lot. On a couple of nights we walked back to our hotel around 11:00 p.m. Even though we really didn’t know the areas in which we were walking, we never felt unsafe at any point. We could tell it was safe because we noticed women walking alone late into the evening. That would not be the case in many U.S. cities.
Like most of Europe Paris was loaded with restaurants, cafes, bistros, bars, and clubs—filled with people every night. People I talked to said that most people here live in small apartments. Going out in the evening with family and friends to escape their living space is part of the culture. That is one of my favorite parts of visiting Europe, mingling with people out in the evening. You see more people talking and laughing with each other, not looking like their addicted to their cell phones.
COVID was devasting for the people here. A sandwich shop owner named Yann told us that people were locked down and could only leave their home for groceries or to walk a dog. And it was enforced by the police. You were required to fill out grocery papers or dog papers and carry them with you in case you were stopped. Yann said a lot of dogs were adopted—then abandoned when COVID ended. When the vaccinations came out initially, those who got the jab received special treatment and received more freedom. No wonder 85 percent of the population is vaccinated; it got you out of the house and gave you access. People give up their freedoms much more freely without question in Europe. People in the U.S. are much more wary. Us older people are aware of the slippery slope. History has shown repeatedly, no matter what the political system, that people with power will take away the freedoms of people without power. Once it starts on the little things, it moves on to bigger things. This is a fact borne out through history.
And oh, the Food. OMG! People are right, the food here is incredible. Everything tasted better—even the pads of butter at the hotel breakfast tasted better. A good tip is stay at a hotel in Europe where they serve breakfast. We filled our backpacks with bread, cheese, and meats to take with us for the day.
The taste of the food blew me away: the cheese, the chocolate, the pastries, the wine. I didn’t know you could create so many pastry combinations. It seemed like anywhere you stood in Paris there was a pastry and bread shop within a few blocks. If heaven has food, it would be filled with French patesseries (pastry shops). If I were in a coma, Paris would be a good place because they could put a tube in my stomach and hook me up with French Onion soup—although it would bypass my tongue. I had a lamb shank in some kind of wine gravy with potatoes. I think a shank is part of the lamb’s leg. There was a night I had all-you-can eat mussels in garlic butter for $18.
We were told if was very common for a couple to go out and buy wine, bread, and cheese and have a picnic in a park or on the banks of the Seine river. We were going to try it, but decided against it because if we purchased the stuff, by the time we walked to the picnic spot there would only be scraps of bread left.
Speaking of food, we had to take this 3-hour food tour with a guy from Croatia named Davide. He took us around to several outstanding shops and restaurants taste the food. He gave us alot of details about the history of food. I paid less attention than Rebecca. I was more focused on the next place to eat.
Davide said that the French government gives foods awards to people and restaurants. These are prestigious and the French are very proud of them. We learned that many of the English words we use in cooking come from the French language. I thought of crepe and bisque.
There was a thin lady from New York City on the tour. She rarely smiled. She kept calling her personal trainer to get permission to eat the samples. He finally told her it was OK because she was on vacation. Weird.
Besides my undressing at security entering St. Chapelle, Rebecca also had an incident regarding the metro. When entering the metro station, you had to put your ticket in the slot and it would pop up. When you grabbed the popped-up ticket, the turnstyle in front of you would allow you to pass, then there was aluminum half-door that you had to push through. The half-door was there to prevent people from jumping the turnstyle like they do in New York City.
Well, the first couple of attempts, Rebecca would put the ticket in the slot, it would pop up, but the turnstyle wouldn’t move, which caused people behind or around to intervene and get her through it somehow. This all culminated in the turnstyle finally opening, but the aluminum half-door wouldn’t budge. Rebecca was trapped between the turnstyle and half-door with folks standing in line behind her. The man behind the glass window had to stop ticket selling and come free Rebecca from the entrapment. We had no metro issues after that except for the smell.
Outside of Rome, Paris has the most Christian history.
At the Shrine of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal lies the incorrupt body of St. Catherine Laboure and the box that contains the heart of St. Vincent de Paul. We Catholics often notice people who wear the Miraculous medal (at least Rebecca notices, I really don’t very much). During St. Catherine Laboure’s second apparition of the Blessed Mother in 1830, she saw Our Lady standing on a globe crushing a serpent. Rays of light came from her hands and lit up the globe. An oval shape formed around the vision. She heard a voice tell her to create a medal like the vision. On the backside of the medal, place the initial M on a cross with the Sacred Heart of Jesus crowned with thorns and the Immaculate Heart of Mary pierced with a sword underneath it. The medals were created and they spread like crazy.
For some reason the heart of St. Vincent de Paul is here. But I haven’t looked up the reason. We didn’t make it to the St. Vincent de Paul shrine nearby to see if the rest of his body was there.
The remaining relics of St. Genevieve (another patron saint of Paris), are held in a church called Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. We went there. I say remaining because most of her relics were disinterred and scattered to the mob or publicly burnt during the French revolution. The church also contains the body of Blaise Pascal.