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Started the day off at Montmartre, and since it was close to the hotel, we decided to walk it there. We did Rick Steve's quick tour in reverse, working clockwise from the Moulin Rouge (underwhelming, at least from outside - we didn't go in), up rue Lepic to see the outside of Van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec's houses (also underwhelming), to La Terre, the main restaurant and artist's square, to Sacre Coeur Basilica. The view from the dome was amazing even with the 300 steps up and the 300 steps down the narrow staircase.
From the dome, we heard a musician (Youri) singing at the steps below the basilica. He had a huge audience on the steps and was very entertaining. There was even a couple that had just gotten married that came by to listen to him. We made our way down to listen for a bit too, and ended up buying one of his homemade CDs!
Earlier at La Terre, there were these 2 guys harmonizing that we gave change to, and we thought to go back after seeing Youri, to buy their CD too, but they were gone by the time we returned :(
We did buy a three small drawings from this Chinese artist at La Terre though. The whole time we were transacting, we were speaking to him in bad French, but it turned out that he spoke Cantonese!
We circled back down to rue Lepic because there was so much fresh food there - fruit, bread, BBQ meat, fish, cheese. We picked up a rabbit meat sausage and a chicken and onion sausage, a couple of croissants and some strawberries and went back to the hotel for lunch! It was the cheapest and best lunch we had in France.
After the quick 'picnic' lunch, we metroed down to the places we missed yesterday because of the strike. We only had about 3 hours to see these places before they closed.
St. Chapelle: We bypassed the long line again with our museum passes (woohoo!) and entered through the lower part of the church. At first we were like huh? Is that it? But then quickly realized that there was an upstairs. And oh! Did that make the trip to the church worth it! Panes of long stained glass lighting up the whole room! We tried to pick out the bible stories and characters in the glass, but it was a little hard to tell what was what b/c some of the scenes were based from the Apocrypha.
Beside St. Chapelle was the Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette, as well as many prisoners from the Revolution were held before trial and eventual execution. Depressing.
We then quickly metroed down to the Pantheon to see Focult's pendulum (very cool), and the crypt where many of Paris' VIPs are buried: Pierre and Marie Curie, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Voltaire, and a bunch of other important French people and nobles that we've never heard of. We stayed until the Pantheon closed at 6 pm.
Even though it was closed, We metroed over to Pere Lachaise cemetery - the furtherest east in Paris we had ever been - to catch the #69 bus, the poor man's car tour of Paris :) Instead of spending oodles of money on a tour car or a taxi, we just paid for 2 bus tickets to go from the east end of Paris until the Eiffel Tower at the west end and see most if the sights that we'd seen in between.
We grabbed a quick bite at Le Bosquet nearby and travelled to the Champs Élysées FNAC to pick up another micro SD card - yes, Pete had taken a lot of pictures and had pretty much filled his two 8 GB cards already. Rather than risk not having enough space, we picked up a decent 16 GB card. Thankfully, it wasn't ridiculously expensive, and the price quoted included the VAT already.
Our last stop before we headed to the hotel? Laduree again for another 4 macarons to share. Darn you, Laduree for being so tasty yet so dang expensive!
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