Day 7 – Dec 29th
Paris here we come! We say “adios” to the Avonmore and take a taxi to Waterloo Station. The check-in process of the Eurostar train to Paris is more akin to boarding an airplane than boarding a train with security and passport checks and all. And what a pleasant journey! Big seats, lots of leg room and boy is that train fast. The whole journey is about two and a half hours. Just enough time for some book reading, some gazing out the window and some reflecting on the inside of our eyelids. The time in the ‘Chunnel’ itself is about 20 minutes and you would never know you were under water. No strange pressure changes and sadly no windows in the tunnel to see the fishes swimming by.
We arrived in Paris and instantly had a taste for what lay ahead….line ups! It seems that everyone has had the same idea as us to come to Paris during this week. The queue for a taxi outside of the train station was over an hour! Oh well, you learn the hard way. Next time we will take the metro or arrange to have a car meet us. Thankfully, we were pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the hotel that it was not going to be another Avonmore disappointment. However, in the short time that it took to get from the train, into the taxi and check-in to our hotel, one thing has become abundantly clear: everyone speaks French!!! This was definitely NOT in the guide book!
We spent the evening getting our bearings and walking around the city. Brent had hoped to have dinner at a Michelin starred restaurant just down the road from our hotel but all the fish, duck liver and other weird dishes put Beth off. We doubled back and lined up for dinner at Chartier which is a famous Paris bistro type place. It’s in all the guide books so there was a generous mix English speakers. In what eventually became known to us as familiar bistro-style seating, parties of two and three are seated together at large tables of six or eight. Next to us was a man and his son from Long Island, New York. He had brought his son to see the restaurant that he and his wife dined at on their honeymoon 20 years ago. No word on the whereabouts of the wife.
We had ordered first and the New Yorkers lagged behind given their woefully deficient French. The New Yorkers wanted to order one of the 12 fish dishes on the menu but couldn’t tell the tuna from the salmon. In a classic Parisian waiter moment, the New Yorkers asked the waiter what all the fish dishes were and the waiter helpfully circled the word “Poisson” in the menu’s section heading, replied “These are fish” and scurried off to the kitchen, presumably to make fun of the Americans. We were having fun now. Beth came to the rescue with the translations and the Americans were able to enjoy their saumonette and their thon.
