Paris - Visiting Sheila

Paris - In the Tuileries

There were a few things I’d promised to myself to do while I was in Zurich and one of them was to visit Sheila in Paris. For some reason, I was surfing the internet one weekend and suddenly realized that there was an offer for train tickets to Paris – only 100 CHF return! I hasten to add that this was some time before the recent attacks on Paris, as was my visit.

The train journey to Paris from Zurich is really good – it takes about 4 hours, I think, and is direct. The seats are more spacious on the TGV than on a normal train and you have neither the hassle of having to arrive 90 minutes in advance nor all the baggage checks that you have at the airport.

I’d booked a room in a cheap hotel with use of a shared bathroom. The hotel was located not so far from Sheila’s flat and close to a KFC. You can see from the latter where my priorities lay! My room turned out to be on the top floor and there was no lift; the stairs were windy and narrow. The room itself was OK, though. I had my own toilet and basin but I never managed to find the shared bathroom and internet access was only sporadic. For just two nights, though, it wasn’t a big problem. The café just round the corner did delicious breakfast, which was also a compensation.

There were a few things I wanted to do – I wanted to see the twinkling lights at night on the Eiffel Tower (which I did) and I’d noticed that Musee d’Orsay was the number one visitor attraction in Paris and yet I’d never been. I found that quite puzzling, so I bought a ticket online to save me from having to queue, and decided to fill that gap in my experience of Paris.

I originally thought I’d go to the museum on Sunday, but it turned out that I was visiting on the French equivalent of an open doors day (it has some grand name in French as only the French can manage to do), so Sheila and I ended up trying to plan which places we should try and visit. It was a bit of a trauma trying to work your way round the web sites that explained what was on – there wasn’t much explanation and on top of that, navigation, particularly if you weren’t Parisian, was rather opaque.

Nevertheless, we got a plan together and It all started off not too bad. We got to some kind of pharmacy museum and were the first there, so we went off for a coffee beforehand in a nearby café, and then returned just before it opened. The tour was all in French, so it reminded me of Geraldine visiting me and everything being in Swiss German on the long night of the museums. My French is definitely rusty to say the least! Still, I quite enjoyed trying to follow what they were saying. It filled me with renewed enthusiasm for brushing up on my French again at some point (but I think this at regular intervals and never do anything about it).

We went back to the café and from there it started to go horribly wrong. We ordered the lunch menu and got as far as our starters (which were quite impressive, if rather mayonnaise-laden, prawn cocktails). After that, we just didn’t get served. We waited and waited. We complained at least twice. Still nothing arrived. In the end we put the money on the table to pay for our starters and just left. They didn’t even run after us.

Everything that we tried to visit after that had such long queues that it was pointless to try to get in. I won’t bore you with the details (I have in any case blotted them from my memory). We did end up at a place describing how they purified and distributed water in Paris, but apparently you can go there any time and it’s always free, so actually there wasn’t so much point in going (although it was still interesting enough and they had a film for me to practice listening to French again and to sit down after all that walking).

The next day, I went to the Musee d’Orsay, armed with my online ticket. I took my time and wandered around outside, and then tried to find the entrance. To my dismay it was closed and opening with a new exhibition the next day. But for me that was too late!

I decided to go for a coffee (that’s my solution to all my problems), but first of all I needed to get money out. It took me quite a long time to find a cash machine. I saw a photographic exhibition advertised as I walked about, thought I’d pop in and see that, only to find that it didn’t start until the next day either. My luck just wasn’t in.

I finally got money out (it was quite pleasant wandering about, to be honest, and the weather was good), had my coffee. I then realized that the Tuileries were just opposite the Musee d’Orsay and I’m not actually convinced that I’d ever visited them before, so I ended up enjoying walking round there. I saw the monolith that Egypt had given to Paris, mentioned during our tour of Luxor temple when Sheila came to Egypt. Seeing the monolith like this in the centre of Paris gave me the impression that my recent past and my present were in that moment being united and it somehow suddenly felt that everything was just as it should be.

After treating myself to a KFC, I returned to the hotel to collect my stuff only to find Sheila there waiting for me. Her appointment had been cancelled and she’d actually tried to find me at Musee d’Orsay (only also to find it was closed, of course). We might even have stopped off for a coffee at the same place but we never actually crossed paths.

Anyway, it was great to see her and to have a final chance to chat again before I left (that was, after all, the main reason for my being in Paris, so all the problems weren’t really important). We went to the station and treated ourselves to a coffee in Le Train Bleu – it was a really beautiful and stunning end to the stay.