Mal's travels - A story about my journeys by Mal J Robinson: Day 109 - Paris

Today was going to be a day at the client site in Saint Denis and then into Paris for an interesting evening of sightseeing. The working day was good and I met alot of people I had met in sites around Europe and it was nice to see them again. But as we are in France and handshake land it was a formal day. At one point i did have a little giggle. If you watch football nowadays you will know that as the teams take to the field they line up and then one team walks down the line of the other shaking every other team members hand. Well as we were in the meeting room around 10 people were sat down when another 5 entered and the 5 all then proceeded to walk around the room shaking hands with everyone of the 10 sat down. It was just like watching the start of a football match. Well, the day finished and we got back to the hotel and agreed to meet in reception at 5.45 p.m. for a trip into the centre of Paris.

We left the hotel at 5.45 p.m. and walked the 200 metres to the local metro station. The first obstacle was to try and buy a ticket that would get us into the centre. The ticket machines were so hard to decipher that we looked for some human but none that were employed by the metro seemed to be about. Eventually after about 20 minutes a man appeared at one of the windows that should have been the open ticket office and we were sold a day ticket which seemed to be the best option and we headed for the train.

We traveled the couple of stops that got us to the Notre Dame and I took the chance to go into the church and take a look around, I took some photos which are below. I also took the chance to light a candle. The church is really beautiful, I have been in before but a lot of years ago and as a communion service was taking place it made it a little more special. The stained windows and statues are really something to see. It has a lovely peaceful feeling as most churches do but this seems special as the place was very busy. My Nottingham colleague and I spent about 15 minutes in there but we had left our Belgian colleague outside looking for her friend so I didn’t want to be too long.

We parted with our Belgium colleague soon after as her friend was due to arrive and from the Notre Dame we started a walk, this took us along the banks of the River Seine and to the Louvre, more pictures attached below. The area was really nice and after a brief pause we continued through a lovely park with people sat in the evening sunshine relaxing. We walked past the Place de la concorde which is a stick monument and onward toward the Champs Elysees. This was really busy but with the side shows taking place on the pavement it was a nice walk. We eventually landed at the Arc de triumph about two hours after we left the Notre Dame. But we didnt stop there, we continued,we turned right down some quite nice looking street with restaurants and as we looked at some of the menus we could not believe the prices, over 100 euros for a single dish and I took a photo of one menu with a starter for 168 euros. Laughing to our selves we continued along the Rue de artons until we found our way to a little cafe that seemed to be for the locals and not tourists. We stopped for an evening meal. I had a cheese and ham Panini and my Nottingham colleague had the same. Very Parisian we were and washed down by a coke light, not wine so I suppose our Parisianess came to an end. We had arrived at the cafe at 9.00 pm. So we ate up reasonable quickly and then headed to the local metro to travel to the Paris du nord station to meet our Belgian colleague

This is where the evening went a little wrong.

We had texted our Belgian colleague and agreed to meet her at the station but as we got to the platform where we were going to meet and then get our train to the metro stop near the hotel there was a lot of activity and two policemen shouting something at us and the other people on the platform. No idea what he said and when we said “parle vous engla”, he walked off ignoring us. As we stood mystified, with no one leaving and just watching the policemen shout, a number of firemen started to enter the place, dressed up in the full fire fighting gear but not putting any fires out. There were extra police arriving all the time, with more and more milling around, more firemen seemed to be appearing from every opening but again, rushing around but nobody holding a hose. So we all watched and took photos.

Then in no time the army arrived and it must be my age but they all looked like kids to me with great big guns. They began lining the platforms and told us to get out. We agreed that at this point it might be good to do just that and we left the platform along with other like minded people.

The clever ones of us rushed to the taxi rank and jumped into one of the endless stream of taxis that were coming from nowhere, I think there must have been some call going out to the taxi drivers of Paris as there were literally a stream of taxis as far as the eye could see down the road. As we left the scene in our taxi more fire engines were arriving and also unmarked blue vans with blue lights on top. It was an interesting 30 minutes but we were glad when we arrived back at the hotel at about 10:30 p.m. or so.

I have a little bit of work to do before I get some sleep, I want to have a good nights rest as tomorrow night we do it all over again as we want to visit the Eiffel Tower.

Night All