Paris

Sunday October 7, 2007

Today, along with the rest of the world it appeared, we enjoyed a beautiful October Sunday in Paris. We started off with a walk down Rue Mouffetarde to check out its many specialty food shops and market. This was mainly brousing today, since we can buy very little more to take home and there’s only so much food we can consume in a day and we’re doing a very nice job of consuming more than we should already. We finished the morning by going to St. Sulpice, which none of us had seen before. This is the church featured prominently in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code fiction. Of course he did such a good job of convincing us that there might be a fair bit of truth to his story, that the church had some nicely posted disclaimer signs reminding us that Brown’s “rose line” that’s runs through the church was never called that and in fact is a meridian line only. Also the P & S on the stain glass windows have nothing to do with the Priory of Sion, but rather stand for Peter & Simon. As well, there was never an ancient church built on this site that has maintained some cult following. I don’t know, but methinks they protest too much. One thing for sure – the line that runs obliquely across the altar and ends up in an obelisk in one corner of the north transept is pretty strange.

Following a pique nique lunch in Jackie & Tony’s room – they have a balcony with chairs and table – we’d took the metro to Montmartre. Once again the throngs followed us and ate up the view of Sacre Coeur – the amazing white on blue contrast of church and sky that today’s fabulous weather afforded us. We sat for a while at a café immediately below the church to have a drink and continue to soak up the ambiance. Our metro ride back to the hotel was “super sardine city”. Every time we thought no one else would fit, 5 or 6 more people crammed in. In the evening, at the recommendation of our weekend desk manager at the hotel, we ate at le Petit Zinc, just off Blvd. St. Germain. We all had fabulous meals and once again ate too much. We would readily return here for future meals, if it were not for the remaining hundreds of Parisan restaurants that we have yet to frequent.