Wednesday 17th – Week 1 – Notre Dame, Jardin Des Plantes, Latin Quarter, Jardin Des Luxembourg

Catching up to the present now, thankfully. Today it's the hottest it's been since we arrived – in the high 20's and not a cloud in the sky.

Our walk today was a lot more local than the previous couple of days and started with a walk to the Seine, over the Pont Neuf and then down to Notre Dame. Saw a cool site at the Notre Dame. There was a group of very young children being taken on an outing to the cathedral. In order to keep them in line, there teachers had two long pink ropes with hand hold at regular intervals. The children were all in a line with one pink rope down one side of them, the other pink rope down the other side. The children then held the hand holds and got marched around the cathedral. Civil libertarians would be having a fit, but it was a pretty effective way to keep them all in check. (See photos). After a walk around the inside of the Cathedral, we headed off to the Ile de St Louis, then down to the Jardin Des Plantes past the Paris University.

We hope that the campus of Paris University is closed for refurbishment. If it's not, then I think there only graduates are drug addicts and taggers, because it looked like it was in an awful state of repair.

The Jardin Des Plantes is one of the many big public gardens in Paris and has a zoo and an indoor tropical garden. It was nice walking around the garden and also nice to get a chance to walk in the shade, because the day was awesomely hot.

After the Jardin Des Plants, our walk took us to the Latin Quarter. We have a book of Paris walks that we are working our way through. We don't follow the walks too strictly and if we see something that takes our fancy, we go off and look at that as well. Paris is a great city to walk around and it's a cheap way of seeing lots of the sites. The Latin Quarter is quite similar to where we are staying in Saint Germain, as it has lots of little streets that are absolutely full of restaurants and bars. After the previous days marathon walk, we were determined that we would stop and have a break and some lunch today. The first stop was a little bar on a tiny little square with restaurants all around it. We only stopped because I needed a comfort stop and the price of $E9 (9 euros) for a small Orangina and a small mineral water seemed fairly steep, but when you need to go....... Anyway, for $E9 you would think that you'd get a normal toilet, not the French “two feet and a hole in the ground”. Never mind, when in France......

Anyway, after the drink break we carried on walking and found a really quaint little street with lots of really nice looking restaurants – you know, cane chairs, white linen table cloths, decent sized wine glasses, so we stopped there for lunch, before continuing on to the Sorbonne University, then a high school that is claimed to be the most exclusive in France. Finally, we walked through the Jardin De Luxembourg, which was really beautiful and full of university students enjoying an afternoon in the sun.

Dinner that night was a light meal (carpaccio and a Pizza to share) in a little Italian restaurant.