More Parisian Icons (Napoleon's day out) - Day 3

12th April 2009

Up for another big day in Paris, we got organised and had our day planned out. We thought we'd avoid churches and religious monuments today, we'd figured that Easter Sunday is a religious day for some, and we wouldn't want to impose (but also because I was becoming a little churched out). First stop was going to be the catacombs (details on what this is later), so we walked down to the metro and took the journey. Thanks again, Matt and Jodie for giving us the heads up on where to find this place. It looked like a little public toilet block on the side of the street. Just a little sign to let everyone know what it actually was. We crossed the street and found that it was closed. Great, that's another thing that we'd have to revisit during the trip, not to mention the waste of a train ticket. We jumped back on the metro and set off for our second stop of the day the Arc de Triumphe.

After navigating the metro tunnels we emerged right at the Arc. It was much bigger than I'd expected it to be. As I commented to Dan, it doesn't really stack up to the arch in Ballarat. We took a few photos with all the tourists and headed back down into the tunnel to take you over to the bottom of it. The Arc is in the middle of a massive big roundabout. Trying to cross it on foot would probably be classed as suicide (French drivers are nuts). We decided that we wanted to climb up to the top, so again we queued for tickets. Again, another attraction where I get cheaper tickets than Dan. It sucks for him to be old. Everywhere offers 18-25 prices, but you have to be from the EU to claim it, so I quite casually was able to lie and claim that I was British. Tickets bought and we thought we'd head straight up to the top. The steps of death awaited us; Steep, curly stairs, and a s***load of them. Urgh. We finally reached the balcony level where they had a little exhibition on the Arc. There was an interactive thing that showed a world map and where victory arches could be located. You clicked on the little dot of the country/town and it would bring up a picture and information of the corresponding arch. After we finally got a go, we found that the only one listed for Victoria was the Ballarat arch. I had a good giggle in the fact that I had mentioned this to Dan only 10 minutes beforehand! The two structures aren't even in the same league. It was almost embarrassing that they had the Ballarat one there. It showed that Napoleon commissioned the victory arch, but was long dead by the time is was finished being built. So it's now used for all the French state funerals and such. We moved on and up again more stairs to the top. The view from the top was pretty cool. 360 degree view of Paris. We looked straight down the Champs Elysees and over to the Eiffel Tower and saw all the famous landmarks. Time to trudge back down all the damned stairs. There was so many I got dizzy from going round and round the spiral staircase so many times. Back on the ground we took the customary photos of the unknown soldier's tomb. And some names on the walls etc.

We said goodbye to the Arc and started strolling with the masses along the Champs Elysees. It wasn't hard for me to fight the urge to go into any of the stores. I've never really understood that obsession with spending hundreds of dollars on designer clothes; they generally look crap anyway. Dan did drag me into a Peugeot dealership, which was the most fancy car shop I've ever seen. It even had its own restaurant inside, as well as games and demonstrations and concept cars etc. There was only a couple of cars on show for sale. I had to drag Dan out and we continued along the Champs. I engaged in a kamikaze mission of taking a photo of the Arc from looking up the Champs Elysees from the middle of the road. It was well worth almost being killed, the photo is great! We managed to find our way into a Virgin Books Megastore, I was on the quest to find the third Twilight book, but it was proving difficult to find one written in English whilst being in France. Two minutes in the store and Dan had found it. Yippee, I can continue reading about Edward and Bella. Thanks for being so global Richard Branson.

After grabbing a quick baguette for lunch we made our way into a cute little park to eat. There was a crazy puppeteer trying to round up kids to go see his show. Creepy and crazy more than entertaining, parents were mad to send their kids into see him. We shook off our crumbs and finished the walk up the Champs Elysees, which ended at Concord. It's basically a big square with a big stick in it. We only found out from our housemate when we got back to England that the big stick was a gift from the Egyptians and its hundreds of years old.

From Concord we headed towards Invalides. We were heading for the big gold domed roof of Napoleon's tomb. We walked up through the beautiful parks where there were groups of kids and adults playing games of soccer. Dan got so excited, once when the ball got kicked out of grounds and he got to kick it back to them. We arrived at the museum at the wrong end and had to buy tickets through a machine, and I couldn't claim my youth price. Damn, I'd finally have to pay a full price for something. The first part of this building, which was built as a hospital for people hurt in the war, is now a war and military museum. The first section we went into was all about General Charles de Gaulle. I was not impressed that we were back in doing war stuff, I had declared an end to it, back in Caen. It was pretty boring in the Charles de Gaulle section anyway. None of the exhibitions had been translated into English yet, so each one we approached our headphones would say "This exhibit is not in English yet, thanks for your patience". I had run out of patience by the end of it. We walked out and I wanted to skip the other war rooms, and just wanted to get to the other end to see Napoleon's tomb. We headed in the big gold roofed building, with all the crowds, and was blown away by the interior of the building. It was all marble and gold with massive ceilings, and a big cut out circle in the middle of the room. I immediately went over and looked down to see his gigantic tomb. Dan sensibly went and found audio guides for us to explain everything in there. There was really only the one thing too see though. This fancy tomb was built out of really expensive marble, but there were 4 different coffin's or containers inside that holding him in. Sort of in the same vein as Russian Dolls. Coffin inside a coffin inside a coffin etc etc. It ended up being about 4 meters long and high by 2 meters wide. Huge. Maybe he was over compensating for something?

After here we headed out to the gardens outside where I sat and read the France guide and relaxed while Dan went back to look at more war stuff. I really couldn't face another thing.

From here it was just back to the apartment and grabbed pizza from the downstairs shop of our apartment block, and straight to sleep. I needed to regain strength and enthusiasm for the next 2 days - Disneyland!