We started day 2 of our Paris trip with a breakfast in the hotel restaurant. We arrived towards the end of the breakfast serving time and were not left with too much choice (note to self: get up earlier).
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| Planning theday ahead |
Our plan for the day – walking around Paris seeing as much as we can!
When we left the hotel we walked past many restaurants as we were staying in a very popular restaurant region. The French seem to love seafood and there were amazing displays of seafood outside some of the restaurants.
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| Seafood on display |
We first walked through Jardin Du Luxembourg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jardin_du_Luxembourg), a lovely garden with a big palace on one side. It is the second largest public park in Paris and contains over a hundred statues, monuments and fountains.
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| The gardens |
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| The palace |
From there we made our way to the Pantheon. It is a beautiful building with an interesting history (http://www.pantheonparis.com/). The Pantheon was built under the orders of Louise XV as a monument displaying his gratitude to God after his health had recovered. It is now a mausoleum and is a burial place for martyrs and brilliant French citizens.
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| The Pantheon |
We then continued our walk...
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| An interesting wall |
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| Pictures of the outside of Notre Dame Cathedral |
We were fascinated by the gargoyles as there were so many around the outside and they were quite scary looking. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargoyle) gargoyles were carved with a spout design so that water could run off the building. It comes from the French word gargouille and literally translates to “throat” which makes me think of the gargling sound the water would likely make when running down the gargoyles.
It was interesting to see these scary looking creatures on a cathedral but apparently they were used by the church to convey messages. It is thought they were used to scare people into coming to church and it is also thought that their presence meant that evil was kept outside the church walls.
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| The gargoyles |
The inside of the cathedral is beautiful with amazing attention to detail. The stained glass windows can be seen on all the walls and they are all different and incredibly detailed. There are also a number of models of the Chuathedral on display.
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| Inside Notre Dame Catheral |
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| Beautiful stained glass windows |
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| A model of the Cathedral |
And the walking continued...
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| Tour Saint Jacques |
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| Hotel De Ville |
We finally arrive at the Sacré Coeur (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargoyle) in Montmatre. Sacré Coeur means “sacred heart” and is a Roman Catholic church and minor basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
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| Sacre Coeur |
We decided to walk up the 300 stairs to get a breathtaking view over Paris. This is definitely something I would recommend.
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| Climbing the 300 steps |
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| Amazing views |
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| Sacre Coeur as it was getting dark |
Tired and hungry we walked back towards our hotel and stopped at the nearby Le Rotonde restaurant for dinner (http://www.rotondemontparnasse.com/). After seeing all the seafood everywhere we decided to give it a try.
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| The huge seafood platter |
The display looked great but we were not used to many of the shellfish on our platter. The prawns and oysters were the best and very fresh and tasty. The rest of the shellfish could have been left off the platter as they were not to our taste. Good to experience but we will stick to our South African style cooked seafood platter.
12 hours after leaving our hotel we arrived back for a very well deserved sleep...
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