By now, we had visited all the important sites in Paris that we wanted to see. So we had a later start this morning. I went to Pret A Manger (3 minutes from the hotel) and bought breakfast for everyone to eat at the hotel. Then we took the Metro to the Sacre Coeur Church. Recall during our trip to Montreal in 2022 that M2 really liked riding the Metro. Now after her first year of university and commuting on the Toronto subway system, she appreciates the cleaner and calmer Montreal Metro even more. Well, the Paris Metro system is even older than Toronto's and more rickety. But there was a singer on board our train car so the entertainment was a bit better.
The Sacre Coeur is on top of a hill and we had to climb many stairs to get there. It was like the Arc de Triomphe all over again. We passed by the stairs where John Wick rolled down in the movie. My buddy, Wilson took a picture there when he visited two months ago. I took a similar picture and now let's see if we can Photoshop it so that it looks like we were there together.
There were prayers going on when we went inside and we had to be quiet and respectful. We walked around the perimeter, admiring the sculptures and stained glass windows. Outside there was a man standing on a pedestal dressed in all white and even his face was covered in white make-up. We thought it was a statue but we saw him move. I'm not sure what the purpose of that was but he must have been very hot in the sun.
On our way to lunch, we witnessed a fight between construction workers and we walked quickly to get away. Were we in the wrong part of town?
Lunch was at the Pink Mamma restaurant, recommended by one of my co-workers. It was a nice Italian restaurant with lots of greenery around the walls, kind of like the Rainforest Cafe. And the walls were really giant windows so it was very bright, unlike the Rainforest Cafe, and I liked that. This seemed to be a very popular restaurant as there was a line-up to get in - we had reservations. Again, the restaurant was narrow, but had 3 stories. Buildings in Paris seems to build upwards. I got spaghetti bolognese, M1 got a mushroom pasta, M2 got risotto, and M3 got grilled beef. I'd say the food was okay, not great, given the line up. (I liked the pasta at Zapi better.) We did get a creme brulee to share (it was a big portion and we almost couldn't finish it) and it was very good.
We had one more attraction left on our City Pass and chose to go to a chocolate museum - my girls had enough of art and history museums. Well, here we did learn about the history of chocolate. A big plus, though, was that there were free samples of chocolate included with our admission. So this became M3's favourite attraction of the trip.
We were planning to go to the Picasso Museum or Musee D'Orsay next but as I said, the girls didn't want to go to any more museums. We looked on the map and saw that we were 15 minutes from Chinatown so we walked there. But it was a disappointment (or we went to the wrong place) because Chinatown was barely even a street. It was kind of like a back alley with a few restaurants and grocery stores. It didn't even smell like Chinatown.
For dinner we went back to the Vietnamese restaurant by our hotel. This time it was open and M3 was able to get her banh mi. But it wasn't without difficulty. You see, banh mi is only available for "take-away". Perhaps they wanted us to order something more expensive if we are going to take up a seat in their narrow restaurant. The rest of us were ordering entrees as well as an appetizer to share so I thought it should be okay. I asked (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) if we could order it as "take-away" and just eat it here. Eventually they relented and M3 finally got her banh mi on the third try!
Big Oh
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