MHS Travel Club: City Tour

We started this morning with a bus tour and another local guide, Laurent. Paris has 20 different districts, each with its own personality and town hall. We will see many of them throughout our tour.

From our hotel we drove along the Seine up toward the Eiffel Tower and passed over one of Paris' 37 bridges in front of the Palais de Chaillot, built for a World's Fair and now home to 4 museums.

We drove along the right bank which has beautiful mansions with stone and iron work. Napolean the third (who is both a nephew and grandson of Napolean) is responsible for modernizing the city of Paris. He took the medieval city and brought in gas lights, rail stations, and wide boulevards for strolling. Hausmann was his city planner who designed the beautiful boulevards that radiate out from the Arc de Triomphe. The buildings in Paris are the same height in most areas which makes it look visually very appealing. In this residential district we passed a ststaue of George Washington.

Next up is the Arc de Triomphe on Charles de Gaulle square, called star square because of the 12 boulevards that meet here. This was built to commemorate Napoleon's victories, although he died before it was completed. It also houses the Tomb of the Unknown soldier. We saw some artistic driving around the Arch as we made our tour - it's insane how the Parisians drive.

It's down the Champs Elysees home to cafes, cinemas, and high end shops. It's where the Tour de France finishes also. It ends at the Louvre museum in the other end. We saw an example of the national sport - "demonstrations and strikes" - in front of the Renault store as well as the famous Ladurée macaron shop.

The second part of the avenue is the entrance of the Tuileries gardens which extend quite long and past some more museums built for the Workd Fair in 1900.

At the end of the boulevard is the Place de la Concorde which houses the guillotine where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were killed during the French Revolution with other members of the aristocracy. It now has a huge Luxor obelisk topped in gold (a gift from Egypt) and the Paris Ferris wheel.

We saw the Bourbon palace, which houses the National Assembly, similar to our own House. Members are elected every four years.

We made a quick pass by the Orsay museum, a former train station that now houses Impressionist and later art. We will visit there tomorrow after our visit to Monet's Giverny gardens that were the inspiration for many of his works.

We passed along the gardens toward the Louvre, the old hunting fortress and royal palace until Louis XIV moved the court to Versailles. From here we can see down to the Arc de Triomphe at the other end of the Champs Élysées.

Now it's back onto the Left bank to take one of the wide boulevards down to Notre Dame. We passed through St Germain des Près, one of the wealthier and most elegant districts in the city. It houses many luxury and fashion shops. Famous French philosophers and writers frequented coffee shops and restaurants in this area in the 1950s, such as Les Deux Magots. This area is also where Sartre's existentialism movement was born. Most of these classical buildings date from the late 1800s and look so elegant!

We crossed over into the Latin Quarter where we ate last night. This area is home to la Sorbonne and most of France's top universities. It is called the Latin Quarter because originally these classes would have been taught in Latin. University is almost free in France because they are state run; there are no private universities. It costs only about $1,100 a year! This area is full of medieval streets that are so tiny cars can't even pass through. They look like alleys but are full fledged streets.

As we passed Notre Dame we saw Shakespeate and Co, the quaint bookstore frequented by Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and others where we walked past yesterday on our way to Notre Dame.