We had the hotel arrange a taxi to Lyon Part-Dieu (we were living at a hotel near Lyon Perrache, the other train station) at 5am but we got out early because the room was stuffy so we ended up leaving the hotel at 4:30am and when we arrived, Lyon Part-Dieu was actually not open yet and we had to stand in the rain for about 10 or 15 minutes. But other than that, nothing amiss about the trip to Paris. Once we arrived there, we grabbed brunch at a cafe where we were both not impressed with the too sweet pastry croissants that we had ordered- mine was Nutella with bananas (I didn’t know Nutella was a brand of chocolate sauce, I thought that it was something akin to peanut butter, my mistake) and Mum’s was pistachio cream with raspberries. We went to Versailles (I already bought the Musical Garden show tickets online) on that first day but we did not get to stay until the show due to a thunderstorm but we did take enough signature photos to justify the trip. Originally, we had planned to do all the signature landmarks on this day too (Notre Drame, Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower etc.) but we did not feel like going out in the rain so we called it a day. Dinner was at a place nearby. I ordered half a dozen snails for Mum and the rice with fish for myself. The snails were horrible- Mum thought they were from lunch and reheated but it could as well just be that these were big snails and they really tasted so tough. We ended up not having any of the snails (well, I tried one and spat it back out). The fish was surprisingly good and I was nicely surprised by the rice being normal by Asian standards (I have no idea why but all the non-Asian rice I’ve consumed outside before were either half-cooked or soggy-to-the-extent-of-disgusting, this one isn’t.) It’s a bit soggy but still edible for me.
Day 2 at Paris was supposed to be a trip to the Monet mansion and gardens but I started to feel sick. So we gave it a miss and decided to move the signature landmark trips to this day instead. We started with Notre Dame which was quite close to our hotel (in actual fact, we accidentally came across it the day before when we lost our way when we got back from Versailles). Then we shot some photos at a place overlooking the Seine River, used the metro to get to Hotel de Ville where we took some pictures of the place they were fixing up for the 2024 Olympics as well as Hotel de Ville (we got lost half way and had to catch a bus there, I got the Navigo easy card for us both and preloaded it with 10 trips each. And it was only one stop but I didn’t know, Mum was quite sick and felt really tired and I never liked walking in the first place). The highlight of today was really the Louvre even though we were just doing the front and not visiting the inside and we even snapped a photo of the Eiffel Tower from some garden at the back of the Louvre. We also mistakenly thought the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel was the Arc de Triomphe until I Googled it. And then voila, rain came and back to the hotel. Mum was firmly sick by now and had no appetite so this time only I ate. Not sure what I had.
Day 3 was basically just Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysses. Mum had high hopes of getting me a short jacket at Champs Elysses but we almost could not find it after finishing our shot of Arc de Triomphe and we could not even find the metro station. When rain descended, we hid out on the bus stop. I braved the rain after an extended wait and found Champs Elysses. There was a department store (we felt it was a shopping centre at first) so we went inside for lunch. We ordered the smoked eggplant and caviar with sour cream and pita bread appetiser (we could have ordered 30g caviar at 110 Euro but we were not sure we would like caviar that much so opted to go with the appetiser) and the fried calamari tentacles and the vegetable that looks like asparagus with a way bigger head. The calamari was okay but Mum did not like the caviar appetizer at all and it was too sour for my taste. We did walk along Champs Elysses after lunch but we did not really get to the clothing brands bit, we just stopped after LV and could not be bothered walking further and headed back. Bought something from the supermarket for dinner again. We both broke the fever that night.
On our final day, we had a night flight so we went to Montmartre in the morning (we got off at Abbesses and landed right in the midst of a flea market type of place). I ordered a Parisian breakfast for myself (croissant and hot chocolate/coffee plus orange juice) and an apple pie plus coffee for Mum. The apple pie turned out to be too sweet with the syrup so I told Mum to try it with just the apple fillings which was slightly sour but acceptable to me. We did not actually walk around much and just took a photo of some church because we were wary of heading deeper into the neighbourhood where we had to go through a steep incline first. So we actually missed the Moulin Rouge and the other known attractions in the neighbourhood. Ah well. We skipped lunch as we visited the Pantheon. We got back to the hotel around 2 or 3pm. Technically, we could have visited the Luxembourg garden over at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood but I could not be bothered because every time I walked outside, I just got a headache. So we just waited around for our taxi to the airport. We shared a lemon and poppyseed cake for dinner there before we boarded our plane back to Melbourne.
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