2022-07-11: Paris Day 2

Darrell woke up at 8:00am this morning followed by the others closer to 9:00am. Patrick wasn’t too happy with us waking him up at 9:00am. We got ourselves showered and dressed and headed to the lobby of the hotel for some breakfast. The breakfast was simple but tasty. They had some deli meats, pastries, cereal, toast, yogurt, fruit, and hard boiled eggs available. We could order fried eggs and such if we wanted for an extra cost.

After breakfast we headed out for the day. Our first stop was the Louvre. We had tickets for a guided tour at 11:00am. We made our way to the tour entrance and went through security. Once we were through security we ended up in the main entrance hall of the Louvre. The signage is pretty terrible for the guided tours so it took us a few minutes to figure out where we were supposed to go. We finally figured it out and checked in for our tour.

We met our tour guide, Claire, and she gave an overview of what we would be seeing. The tour was an hour and a half so we only saw a portion of the available exhibits. They have around 35,000 exhibits on display in the Louvre of the over 400,000 that is owned by the museum. If you spent 10 seconds looking at each piece currently on display, it would take you 96 hours to view them all. It is an amazing place. The tour started in the basement of the museum where there are remnants of the original medieval castle that was the first iteration of the site. The Louvre has undergone several transformations over the last 900 years from a small castle to the large palace that it is today. We saw a few of the major exhibits such as the Sphinx, Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Galerie d’Appolon, and David’s The Consecration of Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of the Empress Josephine in Notre-Dame Cathredral. The tour ran a little longer than it was supposed to but we didn’t mind the extra time and enjoyed the tour guides commentary.

We made our way out of the Louvre and headed to Sainte-Chapelle next. We had a timed ticket to enter Sainte-Chapelle at 2:00pm. There was a line up of people with a 2:00 ticket that we had to wait in. It was the heat of the afternoon in the high 20’s so we were getting pretty hot. It didn’t take too long to make our way through the line and enter the church. The second floor of the church has a large number of floor to ceiling stained glass windows which was very impressive. After taking in the sight of the windows, we exited the church and entered the Conciergerie which is next door.

The Conciergerie is an old royal palace and prison. It had an important role during the French Revolution in the late 1700s. It is the place where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned. We toured the great hall and some of the prison cells. What was Marie Antoinette’s cell is now part of a chapel that has since been built. The building once had a staff of around 2000 men during it’s prime.

We were only a couple of blocks from Notre Dame Cathedral so we wandered over to check it out after grabbing a bit to eat at a local cafe. We couldn’t go in the cathedral since they are still restoring it from the fire a couple of years ago, but they had a bunch of information on the fire and the restoration efforts around the exterior of the cathedral. After reading the information posted outside the cathedral, we made our way back to the hotel.

We relaxed in the hotel for a bit before heading for dinner around 7:30pm. We went to a restaurant called Le Pre Aux Clercs. The food was decent but the service wasn’t great. Our waiter was quite slow and messed up the orders a bit. After dinner we stopped by a local market to grab some bottled water. We picked up a six pack for a little over 2 euros instead of the over 3 euros all the cafes seem to be selling a single bottle.

We made our way back to the hotel and called it a night.