Our plan for Thursday was staying around Monmatre and seeing what was in the area of our hotel before getting to the airport around 2pm. We were concerned about rain, but stepped out the front door after checking out of the hotel and putting our luggage in storage decided that it was not nearly as bad as it had appeared during breakfast. We walked to the top of the hill to check out Sacre Cour. The view from the hill was fantastic - after running and running around it was great to get to see the city from this vantage point.
After touring the church (interior pictures were against the rules), we got on the metro and went to an architecture museum. We didn't know anything about it before arriving in Paris, but saw a sign a couple days earlier and found our way back there. It was really neat to see all the pieces and replicas of historical and more contemporary architecture.
A model of Notre Dame!
It was really neat that the view from most of the windows in the museum were of the Eiffel Tower. I do not know if it was intentional, but I think that it is a very engaging selection for the site of the museum.
St. Chapelle! Seeing the model made me wish that this chapel had not been placed in the middle of an important governmental building. As a tourist, it is nearly impossible to get this view of the structure.
Model of the Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve - so neat to see models of buildings I have studied in school.
This was a villa model that I thought was really pretty.
My postcard picture!
After the museum, we went back to hotel to pick up our bags and head to the airport. It was interesting how the transition was set up between the metro and the RER trains. The Paris metro system is very well planned. The maps are clear. Stops that most tourists would like to frequent are labeled not only in French, but also in English and despite having at least 12 lines it is quite easy to navigate.
I assumed that the RER trains and the transition between would be equally clearly designed. Exiting the metro area required rescanning our metro ticket which sadly Diane and I had thrown away. She was impressively able to duck under the turn style while I used an old ticket and we all got through. Next came finding the train and tickets. It is tricky to be able to distinguish between signs directing straight or down...we went down to where the train left but could not find a ticket machine. My father went back up stairs in hunt of a ticket machine. It felt like a very very long time as Diane and I waited for him to return (and it was about a half an hour). Apparently he had to go outside the train station, had a machine reject his credit card, and then finally found a person to sell him 3 tickets to the airport. Thankfully the train did not stop until we got to the airport so it was about a 30 minute ride.
We got the airport and found the security line. The Paris airport is differently organized than any other airport I have been in as most of the food is available outside of the secure area and the security lines only feed into about 4 gates. While this meant we had to eat outside of security it meant that the line to get through security is almost unquestionably short. Although I felt slightly like a traitor eating American in a foreign country I got Pizza Hut (my first pizza in 2 months!). It was not fantastic, but very fun and rather good.
Our plane landed in Helsinki around 8pm and we found our way out of the airport, to the bus, and back to the city center. After checking back into hotel GLO it was time for the three of us to go out for dinner. Part of our motivation was for the strangeness of it, but we went out for tex-mex food in Finland and were thrilled with the results. In addition to enjoying faijtas, cheese sticks, jalepeno poppers, chicken wings, sausage, and a collection of other things we had enough left overs for me to eat for lunch and dinner on Saturday! Once we finished dinner we went back to the hotel and played scabble in the ipad. While still loosing by a large number of points, I did a much better this time than I had yet during spring break. Before we know it, the bar was flickering its lights that it was time for them to close and clearly past our bedtime. I hiked home and went to sleep.
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