The French Dispatches - Part Dix

Let's see - where were we?  In Part 9 of the France blogs, we'd wrapped up our Bordeaux wine tasting day by visiting the Chateau Fombrauge and the village of Saint Emilion, and we had an amazing dinner at our home base in the area, the Chateau Pape Clement.

Relaxing in the garden behind the Archives

I woke up pretty early on Tuesday morning in Bordeaux, worried about whether we were actually going to be able to make it to Paris that day.  Earlier in the year, the French government floated the idea of raising the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 years old, and the French were not happy about it (I'm just praying we get to retire someday at all, so I can certainly understand their ire).  As a result, massive strikes had been occurring across the country, disrupting all sorts of industries and services.  While the strikes are annoying for both locals and tourists, I will give the French credit, though; if any strike is occurring involving employees in the public sector, it must be declared a number of days in advance, so everyone can plan accordingly.  There's even a calendar and everything! 

Anywhoo, Tuesday, February 7th was going to be a strike day.  Train services would be disrupted, not only within major cities, but also between them, and 4 in every 5 trains from the south of France (where we were) would be cancelled.  We'd been checking the SNCF (the national French train service) website starting Monday afternoon, and it still said our train would run, which made us incredibly lucky.  In addition, the two stops between Paris and Bordeaux would be passed by, so we somehow ended up not just on the one train in 5 that was running that day, but also on a direct route, which shortened the journey by 30 minutes.  We seriously need to donate some money to a hospital or charity or something, lest the universe think we weren't grateful for our extreme good luck. (We also spent part of Monday making a contingency plan, should we be unable to take the train back to Paris - we pondered renting a car and driving - it's about 5 hours by car - but thankfully, this didn't come to fruition.)

While we were showering, packing, and frantically checking for updates every few moments, life at the vineyard was going on like normal.

Time to roll out the tractors!

We ate another delicious, filling breakfast downstairs, checked out of our room, and were escorted to the front gate via golf cart, which was both fun and way easier than carrying our bags across all the gravel we'd been crunching through the past three days (we carried them on the way in, but they now had an additional four bottles of wine adding to their weight).  Our Uber arrived right on time, and it was off to the Bordeaux St Jean station!

We passed this building several times on our jaunts from the chateau to Bordeaux,

and I loved looking at its gorgeous mosaic work above the doors.

Bordeaux St Jean station

Before heading in, we popped across the street to Columbus Cafe and Co

to grab sandwiches and cookies for lunch aboard.

The historic waiting room

Our train pulled in right on time (it should!  There were no other trains on the rails!) and we boarded.  The ticket scanning software gave us a minor heart attack when it couldn't find our seats, but it was quickly remedied.  When we booked our tickets (90 days ago, the earliest you could), the train was expected to run with two sets of cars (each set was about 8 cars long), like our train from Paris a few days ago; due to the scaling back of routes, there was just one set of cars on this voyage, and our seats had been in the one that was eliminated.  No worry!  The agent on the platform said, "how about these?" we said, "Sure!" and we were on our way.

How about these?

Sure!  Fine!  Quick!  Get on the train!

The voyage again went smoothly, and we arrived in Paris just two hours later, having enjoyed eating, reading, and surfing the web during the voyage.  We popped out of the Gare Montparnasse right on time and snagged another Uber for the drive to our new home for the next two nights, the Hotel Saint-Louis Marais.

Bonjour, Tour Montparnasse!  Good to see you again!

Although we could have taken the metro from the gare to our hotel, it had reduced service due to the strike, too, and we didn't relish the idea of toting our heavy bags up and down several flights of stairs (some metro stations have escalators, while some just don't - they all have elevators somewhere, but they're hard to find and really slow) and transferring lines in the middle of all this madness.  Although as many Parisians stayed home as possible, the road traffic (pretty bad under normal conditions) was still terrible; many streets were closed off for the strike route, so all of the traffic was funneled into the same thoroughfares.  Our driver did an amazing job, though, tooling down back streets and around corners to get us as close as possible to the hotel, and we ended up with just a very short walk to the front door.

Since the Gare Montparnasse was on the left bank, and our new hotel was on the right, we had to cross the Seine River sometime, and our route allowed us to glimpse the restoration and reconstruction of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

For a point of comparison, here's a shot we took from roughly the same vantage point when we visited in 2018, before the fire (it's not exactly the same spot, but close enough):

Although the angle is different, you can clearly see the two front towers in both shots.

See how the spire from the 2018 photo is completely gone?

That's the section that collapsed due to the fire damage.

Just a few shots of the bananas traffic:

That journey completed, we arrived at the hotel!

Happy to be here!

This leg of the trip was the one that we booked completely on our own - no Travelzoo voucher, etc.  When we were setting things up, we figured that doing two nights in Paris, three nights in Bordeaux, then two more nights in Paris would be a good schedule; that would give us a few days to settle in each location, and we wouldn't have two travel days back to back (something we learned from the first France trip).  Since we stayed on the left bank on the front half of this trip, we wanted to move to the right bank for the back half, and the Marais neighborhood (the 4th arrondissement) was our pick.  

We stayed in the Marais back in 2018, and we really loved the area.  It's bustling but not overly busy, and it's a good mix of shops/restaurants, schools, houses/apartments, and houses of worship (there's a large Jewish population in this area of town).  It's also only a 10 minute metro ride to the Louvre, and just a bit further to Montmarte or the Champs-Elysee; the walk to the Louvre is just over a mile, right along the river, which we'd do tomorrow morning.  The Marais is close enough to everything to be easy but far enough away to be quiet and reasonably priced.  I can't recommend it highly enough.

Although we had reservations for drinks and dinner, they were later in the evening (I wanted to give us enough time to get in and settled from our train trip); after sitting most of the morning, we were ready to stroll, so we put on our warmer clothes and headed out!

A few layers of said clothes - you can't see Chris' long underwear layer - 

the highs in Paris were in the low 40s by this point, and it was really freaking cold.

It may seem silly, give all of the amazing things we've seen and done, but this was one of my favorite parts of our trip - just wandering through the Marais, remembering when we were here almost five years ago, stumbling across the places we came to love while we there.  "Look, it's the crepe place where we ate our first lunch in Paris!" "Hey, there's the cheese shop where we got that really delicious cheese that almost stank us out of our room at Les Tournelles!"  "Oh, the wine shop!"  Along our way, we strolled through the Place des Vosges:

Victor Hugo's house is marked with the French flag

This is our winter 2023 recreation of the shot below...

...taken in fall 2018.

Along the way, we saw more evidence of the strike and the police presence accompanying it:

Tons of police vans

Somehow, we stumbled across the Archives, which despite being right in the middle of the Marais, we'd never found before.  Although the buildings were closed on Tuesdays, the grounds were open, and we found a delightful garden off to one side.

A panoramic of the buildings and inner courtyard

Looking back toward the main gate - I love how the city rises around it

Although the rest was nice, we were getting cold sitting in the shade, so we wandered a bit more, toward the Centre Pompidou, the modern art museum.

Here's my 2018 blog with info on the Centre.

We still haven't made it inside, but some day!

The Stravinsky Fountain, currently under restoration.

We found a lot of restoration/renovation/upgrade projects in process in Paris.

The 2024 Summer Olympics are being held here next year, and they're clearly getting ready.

A gargoyle on the Saint-Merri Church, shown two shots above

Our general plan in our wandering was to make it to the banks of the Seine, to watch the sun set over the river, but we were stopped just short by the protest route.  We've never seen a strike up close and personal, so we went over to take a look.

In addition to being scheduled in advance, the strikes are fairly well organized and pretty calm;

however, you can see in the photo above the smoke waaaay on the right side of the shot.

That was a few blocks down, and it was likely police *ahem* relocating folks

to another space - we didn't hang around for that mess to reach us.

While we (so sadly) didn't see the guys selling barbeque while they were marching, we did see several trucks transporting water and hot drinks for the strikers:

Those are a bunch of little white cups, all lined up.

If you were thirsty during your strike, you could come up and take one.

With strike-watching checked off the bucket list, we headed away from the river and back into the heart of the Marais.  We will still had some time to kill, so when we passed this little shop selling hot chocolate (they were an ice cream stand in the summer), we popped in to check it out.  The place was super cute - you ordered what type of steamed milk you wanted (Chris got dairy, and they had oat milk for me) and the type of chocolate mix (Chris got dulce de leche and I got the special of the day - some sort of fancy chocolate), and they brought everything out for you on a tray.  You mixed it yourself, so you could control the portions.  What a neat idea!

It even came in a beaker, which made us both happy.

It was also delicious!

It was getting close to our first reservation of the evening, so we strolled over to BrewDog Paris Le Marais for some post-dinner drinks and noms.  We visited the original BrewDog in Aberdeen, Scotland during our trip there almost 10 years ago, and as I was planning our Tuesday evening in the Marais, I was stoked to see they had a location here as well.  They make great beer (it was a nice change from all the delicious wine), and their vibe is relaxed and homey.  Placing our order at the bar, we were surprised to be greeted by genuine Scottish accents, and we found our table to enjoy our pours.

Artsy beer photo -

that's my pastry stout (Cake Cartel) on the left,

and Chris' imperial stout (by the Wild Beer Company) on the right.

We also split a house-made pizza, which was great!

After another round of pours (I had a lavender cider that was aggressively lavender, while Chris had a BrewDog IPA, which is what they're know for), we settled up and headed out.  Our dinner reservation was coming up, and it was right around the corner at Robert et Louise, a well-known establishment in this area of town.  Robert et Louise's big draw are their grilled/hearth-cooked meats; since I started researching our Paris trip five years ago, I'd always heard of them, but we hadn't yet had a chance to try their food.  I'm so glad we did - this was a great meal!  Our wines were incredible and the food was out of this world, particularly my orange honey duck.  It was also such a cute spot - it looks tiny from the street, but then you go downstairs, and this whole labyrinth emerges, all cut into the stone cellar (they even used a dumbwaiter to move food from floor to floor).

Our meals - Chris' lamb on top and my duck on the bottom

Absolutely stuffed, we meandered back to the hotel, ready for bed!  On the next blog, another full day in Paris, albeit our last one of the trip!

Au revoir!

Amy

PS - Step count today was 14,919, almost 7.5 miles!

PPS - Zoe, what are you eating?!?!?!

"Nothing, Mom!"