Thursday - Paris





The River Seine with the Eiffel Tower in the background

This was our last day in Paris and we had decided to travel in style by means of tube  so we collected 12 travel tickets for one price that enabled us to go by train within the day anywhere in Paris. The Eiffel Tower was on the agenda!  The weather had turned against us - it had become a cold dismal day and  this made conditions for what I wanted to achieve in photography a bad day. I had envisioned the Eiffel Tower set on a blue sky background, where on the day it was a washed out grey one. The week we had been there we had ( not to sound derogatory or snobbish) been bombarded by many people for money, I only fell for this scam once! It basically was children came around with a form pretending that they were deaf and pointed at their clip board they carried with them. They wanted a donation of a minimum of five Euros I (not to sound a skin flint) only went to gave 1 Euro which in my mind was one pound in sterling, so we both went halves and made it up to five. A short while later I had observed the other group shouting to the two that had approached us and they had heard everything. Saying no thank you in french didn't really deter their persistance. There were old ladies in the street begging, one of our students had said that she had observed a young man pretending to be one. The other persistant people were the street sellers who sold anything from mini Eiffel Towers,post cards to head scarfs. Sometimes it felt like a game of American football to weave past them all. After a brief spell and an altercation with a presumeably deaf girl we left, headed back to the hotel for a warm. We had then decided to return to the cooler weather and go by tube to Montmartre Cemetery, This for me was a very strange experience ( without sounding disrespecting ) I felt like I was in a mixed situation of being in Dr Who surrounded by so many tardis, the other being in an enviroment filled with privies. In reflection the only thing I had seen anything like this was an amazingly beautiful one in Chirk church yard. There were also a few of the traditional head stones, I was taken back to also discover that the church yard also had plots and seemed to be at different heights. Many of these had a splendour about them an air of great importance, a French man there taking pictures himself told me that one of the graves belonged to a composer whose name was Hector Berlioz he had died in1869.

A view of Montmartre Cemetery

              Due to the time the cemetery was closing, so we slowly took a walk back up to the hotel looking for somewhere to have a evening meal, Today was also St. Patrick's day and I found it comforting and funny in a way seeing parts and people decorated  with clovers and hats being worn.

After quite some time we had found the friendly restaurant come bar we had liked a few days previous it was called ' LE CHEVAL NOIR' . The owner had recognised us - here I ordered the much missed coffee that I had been craving, It was so the hit that I needed it didn't touch the sides so to speak. As time went on and I couldn't eat any more couscous we paid and told the polite man that we were going home in the morning and thanked him for his hospitality.