Saturday, May 30th (Day 7)

I'm sitting in a little restaurant in a train station in PortBou, Spain. We just spent all night on a train from Paris and we are waiting for our connecting train to Barcelona. Instead of couchettes, we had reclining chairs for this trip. I definitely prefer the couchette. The train chairs are a little more spacious than airline seats, but it's still a recliner and not a bed.

It's the start of a new day (Day 8), but I must first begin by recounting yesterday. It was our last day in Paris and more relaxing than the first two. We woke up in a hostel (Le Village) in an area called Mont Marchet (Mountain Market). It's filled with shoppers during the day and is on a pretty steep hill. The hill leads up to a church which is one of the top 10 sights in Paris - Sacre Coeurs (Sacred Heart). I started my day with a jog/walk up the hill to this church, which has one of the most spectacular views of Paris other than the Eiffel Tower. There were only a couple of people around in the early morning, and the remains of an apparently huge party were everywhere. The church is a huge dome cathedral with marvelous green statues outside.

We had a good French breakfast (hard roll with butter, croissant with jelly, milk, cereal, orange juice), packed up our bags, and left them in storage while we expored Mont Marchet and Sacre Coeurs. By the time we got back up to the church, it was buzzing with people, musicians, street vendors, etc. We walked through the church, which was typical Catholic. Dark, mysterious, spooky, and solemn. We spent quite a bit of time enjoying a harp player who also had CDs for sale. We also sat by a guy playing guitar and singing familiar songs.

We picked up our luggage at the hostel and carried it with us the rest of the day. This is when packing light comes in really handy! It would have been a long trip back to the hostel to pick up our luggage, so we took it with us, knowing that we wouldn't be doing a tremendous amount of walking today. We hopped on the Metro and went to the Eiffel Tower. This 1000 foot structure is massive and impressive. There is a very nice park around it and thousands of people. We spent a few hours just lounging and napping in the park in close view of the tower. A great place to people watch - or people listen. I enjoy hearing the many different languages being spoken as people mozy by.

One thing I've noticed about France is the low profile and relative absence of bathrooms. I'm becoming convinced that people in France rarely need to go to the bathroom. At a tourist location of this magnitude in the US, you'd have a huge, prominent building with large signs pointing to the bathrooms. You wouldn't be able to miss them. I went out in search of a bathroom and found only one small, coin operated unit that didn't work. For Abel, this isn't a big problem. But for a 51 year old guy, going to the bathroom is a more frequent event in life. It wasn't until a few hours later, on the way out of the park, that we noticed the bathrooms. They were underground, like a metro station, and still surprising very small for an attraction of this size.

We moved from the Eiffel tower to Napoleon's Arc Triumphon. This was about a half mile hike through town. It's a pretty spectacular monument build by Napoleon in the 1600s to commemorate his many victories. The most interesting thing about this place was the difficulty we had getting to it. The arch is surrounded by a circle drive, kind of like a roundabout but bigger. The traffic is moving really fast and weaving in and out at a remarkable pace. Once in a while, a group of brave tourists would run across the road and narrowly escape being run over by the chaotic traffic. There were five or six lanes of traffic on this circle. Surely all those people under the arch didn't get there this way? Or maybe they did and they've been trapped there for days? We walked around for a while and finally discovered stairs leading to an underground passage to the arch. The travel book told us all kinds of interesting historical facts about the arch, but failed to tell us how to get there.

After the Arch, we took the Metro for the last time to the train station. We stopped at a very nice park for an hour or two to kill some time and relax. This idea of killing time has been a refreshing change to me. At home, I usually have 50 things to do and time for about 10 of them in any given day. On this trip, though we've been busy, it's been a self-imposed busy-ness with significant down time. Nice! We were both starving so after the park we stopped at a street vendor who cooked us up a nice salad, steak burger (we ordered chicken, but he didn't speak English), and fries. I don't know how classical French this meal was, but we didn't really care. We were both famished! Besides, they were FRENCH fries. We walked by a McDonalds in our search for food and I'm ashamed to admit that we were both so hungry that we had desparate thoughts that we might have to eat there! A big Mac super sized combo meal was about $9.
We then waited at the train station (Abel gave away our map of Paris to a young lady who asked for directions) and boarded our train for the overnight trip to Spain! Wow! Another country! Another language! Another adventure!