As I headed out this morning, I promised myself that I was going to see the Arenes de Lutece, the old Roman arenas of Paris which I’d never managed to see on my 2 previous trips.
Disappointing.
I had seen great arenas in Nimes and the Roman aqueducts and I expected to see at least some arches. Nope. Just a kind of open area where lions would eat the Christians and romans would cheer. Or something a little less interesting, like soccer.
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To be fair, we didn’t get to go on the tour of whatever it was they had a tour of, but unless they actually showed me the feeding of the lions, I don’t think that it would have made up for the anti-climax I had. Seeing as we were in the area, we tromped off toward the 5th and up around back of Pantheon (my old stomping grounds from ’90). We walked toward Blvd St Michel ( Boul Mich), and toward the Cluny museum. It was raining yet again, and since we weren’t due to met Deb until 5:30, we spent some quality time with the ancient relics in Cluny (ranging from Roman baths to medieval pottery, stained glass and crypts) I adore Cluny, I have a real affinity for the early middle ages and roman times. Renaissance bores me out of my gourd.
After Cluny, as with any museum, we needed coffee and found a cafe to sit in and rest. After we ordered and were settling in, the small glassed in table area came available and a veritable horde of germans came into the cafe and ran into the waiter.
The conversation went as follows:
waiter:Bonjour messiuers! Combien des personnes? (Hello, how many people?)
lead german dude: Dix-huit hommes… sans femmes! (Eighteen men…and no women!)
Loud german laughter here, waiter smiles faintly.
It was fairly amusing, but very noisy listening to them trying to order in French when not all of them spoke french and cries of “cafe creme” and “mit milsch” filled the air.
We squeezed out of the now crowded cafe and walked up past Notre Dame to Les Halles,(another of my favorite places) checked out the postcard vendors that there don’t seem to be as many of, singing dudes from England(?) in orange clogs and tails (I have no idea, but was an interesting sight anyway), more postcards (X-files are BIG over here), and the final walk over to St Eustache near to a bar I used to go to when it was boiling hot.
The bar used to be named the the James Joyce, then, after they didn’t register the name and had to rename it, it was called the james ulysses, then I don’t know what happened. They’ve named it something else. Who cares at this point.
[NOTE: Its Quigley’s Point, but I’m sure it has changed again]
Back to meet Deb at Place St Michel, had a greek sandwich and bad french music piped over the radio, Deb was laughing so hard she was barking. At that point we wandered around back streets, had a cafe liégois at some strange cafe and went home to pass out.
miles walked: approximately 7 miles
