Tour Saint Jacques, Notre Dame, and Luxembourg Gardens

I pass this park every day. It also smells nice since all the flowers have bloomed, in the last month or so. For the longest time, due to my terrible sense of smell, I didn't notice that the first 4-5 blocks of my morning commute just smells like garbage. Not always, but passing by this park is a nice relief. Then after that it's mostly an exhaust smell.

But anyway, look how pretty!

Oh yes, there's a big tower in here too. I don't think you can go up otherwise I think I would have noticed a big line or something.

Next stop, climbing the towers of Notre Dame! I didn't get there till just before 1 and there was a long line, about a 40 minute wait. When walking around I stay pretty warm but when I'm just standing around getting rained on, it got pretty cold. I felt really bad for the two girls behind me in line. They were not prepared for the weather.

My sixth floor walk-up has trained me well for this. The climb was actually really easy considering how high up you actually go. Plus it's not all the steps in one go. And if you were looking carefully, there clearly is no place to go but down....but this was my best picture of the stairs so deal with it!

Panorama from halfway up. I did not realize that for this tour, if you're not climbing stairs, you're outside. There is a loose wire cage covering the walkways. Getting around the corner areas are super super narrow walkways (I should have gotten a picture) with a big groove in the center. It was raining the whole time and the groove bit was filled with water so I stepped on the edges. Then I realized I was probably walking in a gutter-turned-walkway-for-tourists. You can see the Eiffel tower off in the distance. And in the misty background on the right hand side, there is a hill with a bump on top, that's Sacre Coeur!

I think the caption for this one will be "sigh...ennui." The gargoyles were really cool. Though Joe tells me these are actually "grotesques" and real gargoyles are water spouty things.

This one is taking a break from being intimidating to eat some grapes.

A real gargoyle apparently.

At the top! You can basically walk all around the top of the south tower. Here is a view toward the west, you can see the little tree-lined area I walk through everyday, then I cross that bridge (it's got the locks on it) and then I keep walking west towards that big tower in the distance, that's the center of the Jussieu campus. The campus is small. Miniscule compared to Davis! It's basically one building that's shaped like a square ring, mostly open in the middle. And that big tower is in the middle.

Afterwards, I headed to the Luxembourg Gardens. There was a fair number of people walking around despite the rain. I'm sure it gets packed when the weather's nice, it's a beautiful place. But you can't go on any of these grass areas.

Hanging out by the ducks. They all came over expecting bread or something. I didn't have any, I felt bad.

Preening duck. Or maybe it was just normal upkeep, I don't know. I saw 6 males and wondered why there weren't any females. Then a male/female couple came gliding over. That male was clearly the alpha. He was quacking at the other males. I'm not sure if ducks have alphas but if they do, that male (not pictured) was it.

Pigeon win.

It was a little dark between the trees!

I explored the side streets looking for dinner.

There were a few restaurants with a rotisserie right outside the door. My rain jacket was beginning to soak through and my feet were wet. The smell was very persuasive.



Guess what I ate! Crossing that off my list. The green color was a little alarming but it was just the sauce. Actually I'm not sure why it was green, it was a buttery, garlicky sauce. I guess another ingredient. It wasn't bad, it was sort like like a cross between a chewy mushroom and a mussel. Except I actually like the taste of mussels and I couldn't really detect the actual taste of the snail much. I also couldn't feel myself munching on internal organs which is my one small complaint about mussels. I was mostly worried about being able to feel myself chewing on the eyestalks. Nope, they must have shriveled or something during the cooking process.

The next course was bœuf bourguignon with pasta and salad. All the salad dressing here tastes the same, and that taste is BAD. Tolerable, but bad. The beef was really good, if I could make meat tender like that, I might actually...buy it and cook it and stuff...

Dessert was sorbet. Lime sorbet (the scoop at the very bottom) is so good, but it had pieces of zest that got in the way. Lime stuff in general is really good, like that lime-avocado fatface fruit pop at Davis farmer's market!