It's Been a Blur- Part 4

Hi friends! Are you ready for more honeymoon tales? In case you’re wondering why there are about a million pictures on each post, it’s mostly for my family to see, but I hope you are enjoying them as well!

Now, drum roll please, Days 5 of my Parisian honeymoon!

On Saturday, we continued our sightseeing. Our first stop was the Orsay museum, which, in my opinion, trumped the Louvre by far. I loved how close together everything was. It felt as though something incredible was waiting for you around every corner.

Apparently you are not supposed to take pictures in there, but we didn’t realize it until halfway through the museum. I always appreciate my own ignorance in these situations.

This was my favorite painting

Water Lilies- Claude Monet

Next up was Notre Dame. The plan was to climb the towers and go inside the church, but upon exiting the metro, our ears were greeted by angelic singing. As we ventured close to the church, we couldn’t help but notice the thousands of people crowded around and two giant LCD screens in front. It appeared that we had come on the day of the national ordination.

You can see the screen in the lower right corner

 It was a very inspirational moment to be in a crowd of thousands of people, all silent as the priest spoke and sang, only offering up applause as a priest would be blessed and ordained.

This guy was feeding the little birds straight out of his hands.

After about a half an hour of watching the spectacle, we realized this thing was going to last much longer than the typical 1 hour, so we ambled next door to Saint Chapelle.

The gate out front

It was on this occasion that I was so thankful for my smart husband and his precious Paris Pass (the PPP as I like to call it). Now, don’t get me wrong—the Saint Chapelle is a gorgeous church with the most detailed and artistic stained glass windows you’ll ever see. But we spent about 20 minutes inside admiring the place and then left. Meanwhile, we estimated the time to get through the line outside to be between 3 and 4 hours. Wait 4 hours to be in a church for 20 minutes? No thank you.

Following our church tours, we hopped on the metro, then on the train toward the Luxembourg Gardens. We planned to eat lunch there, and while searching for a supermarket, we stumbled upon this beast of a building:

The French Pantheon

It just so happened that the Pantheon was covered under our PPP (really, I wasn’t surprised). Inside, I found myself to be quite overwhelmed with its size. This place was huge!

The coolest part of the Pantheon was the crypts, which housed the remains of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. Again, I got a little star struck with history. Amazing.

Voltaire's crypt

Rousseau's crypt

After getting sufficiently disoriented and rather lost in the crypts, we finally found our way out. Kind of scary to be lost in crypts if you ask me… Then we hit up the Jardin de Luxembourg for some eats.

Potato chips, apple, orange, baguette, Coke, marinated carrots, and Nutella (our food staple)

  I wish we had been able to spend more time there, but we had to rush to a wine tasting at 3 PM. Unfortunately, when we got into the area, the “wine tasting place” was nowhere to be found. Gah.

So we began the trek back home, and on our way, we came across this entertaining scene:

  I should inform you of the irony of this situation. This is the third time where I’ve been traveling in another country and happened upon a huge gay parade. I find it hilarious.

Finally, we made it back to our place, cleaned up, and headed back out for dinner, as was our routine. Since the plan was to go to the Montparnasse tower, we grabbed dinner out that way at this great little Lebanese restaurant. This was Miguel’s favorite meal of the trip.

Miguel had the shwarma mixte.

  I ordered an appetizer sampler. And since the appetizers were pre-selected and our waiter spoke zero English, I’m not exactly sure what I consumed that night. I wasn’t the least disappointed.

I think there may have been falafel, hummus, pickled okra, and samoosa? I'm not even sure if the Lebanese make samoosas...

Mountain of fattoush.

With bellies full of fattoush and whatever else, we trotted off to Montparnasse.

View of Paris, 56 floors up

 

We spent much of the evening wandering the 14^th arrondissement, satisfying our sweet tooth along the way.

Pistachio and vanilla. Mine was better...

Then, around 11:30, seeing as we still weren’t tired (I’m not sure how this was possible), we took a late-night stroll down the Champs-Elysees. What a lovely way to end the night. And trust me, by this time, we were incredibly tired. I was very grateful for our PPP, but was also grateful that it was only good for 2 days. Sheesh.