If you've been following our whirlwind tour of Paris and other lovely bits of France, Belgium and the Netherlands (see list of posts at the end of this post), then you'll know that we had already achieved our Tourism Pro badges during Days 1 and 2. Trained up and ready for an epic day, we left the apartment at a respectable 11:30 or so ready to face a day of serious sightseeing on the Hop-On Hop-Off bus.

Getting there

By Day 3, we'd become complete Paris public transport pros. We got the right bus from the 14th arrondissement, we paid close attention to the stops and made the right transfer to get to our Hop-On Hop-Off pickup point. Tick!

Through the Tuileries again...ahhh....

This took us back to the Place de la Concorde and the Jardin des Tuileries, where we enjoyed yet more loveliness. Being a gardener in Paris must be one of the greatest jobs in the world.

Here's a mini Arc de Triomphe leading into the Louvre.

Finding the ^&%# bus

The address in the brochure was "The Louvre". Under that it said something about the Avenue de l'Opéra. Of course we headed to the Louvre and spent at least half an hour trying to figure out where the Hop-On Hop-Off bus picks up passengers there.

It doesn't.

It stops in front of the Paris Pass ticket office on the Avenue de l'Opéra, not in front of, behind or beside the Louvre. The Louvre and the Avenue de l'Opéra are two distinct locations. They're not far from each other, but they're not the same. The team's morning goodwill took a minor beating with this potential setback, but undaunted and happy to be on the bus, off we went for our ground tour to complement the River Seine cruise we'd taken the day before.

Finally, the Big Bus

The bus is an open-topped double decker driven with precision and a good deal of sang-froid by relatively unfriendly drivers.

Fact delivery system

The tour comes with a pre-recorded soundtrack available through recyclable headphones which can be plugged into jacks beside the outer seats. The commentary includes unforgettable (and I really mean unforgettable - these are still with us weeks after the tour) interludes between historical facts of classical French tunes such as "Les Champs Élysées" (that was Joe Dassin), "La Bohème" and "For me formidable"...ah, the beauty of Charles Aznavour's phrasing and the insane charm of songs sung in la langue de Molière. Please do have a listen and enjoy the videos - there is nothing like a Paris chansonnier to help you find your romantic soul.

You absolutely, positively need a ticket, except when you don't

The first time a customer boards the bus, the driver hands him or her this vital ticket, which the customer must show on hopping back on the bus, except when the driver doesn't ask for it (which seemed to be about half the time). Sometimes people got on through the rear exit of the bus, which was a bit of mystery to me but didn't seem to faze anyone associated with the business.

On our way

Jacked up, comfortably seated on the upper deck, cameras at the ready, we gave ourselves over to the ultimate tourism experience. We got another stunning view of the Opera Garnier from the perspective of our open topped bus.

Montmartre and Sacré Coeur

Our first stop was in the artists' quarter of Montmartre, where many of the artists whose works we were looking forward to seeing in the Musée d'Orsay had lived and painted.

The neighbourhood

Here's a sample of the Montmartre neighbourhood. It's rather seedy in spots and Emma thought it was pretty dirty. @tim-beck and I lamented the lack of dead body outlines, ephemeral artworks by police capturing a last pose of a murder victim. I saw many during my twenties while living in Montreal, so I have to admit a twinge of disappointment and odd pang of expecting the familiar macabre of city life yet finding peace and tranquillity instead.

Some of the streets were lined from top to bottom with merceries, shops which sell any kind of cloth in any kind of fabric, and every trim you could imagine.

Sacré Coeur

The magnificent Sacré Coeur basilica is perched on high ground, affording it unparallelled views of the city. Here we are looking up at the basilica from about a third of the way up.

Here's the view of Paris from that parapet wall in the previous photo.

The walk up is lovely, through exquisite gardens.

Nearly there!

And then we reached the basilica itself and took our places in a polyglot line of visitors from around the world. It was terrific hearing all the different languages, and since the line moved quickly we moved forward in happy anticipation.

Once inside, we had many opportunities to marvel at the Catholic church's expertise at separating people from their money. A couple of euros here, a couple of euros there, all for the opportunity to buy trinkets, votive candles (those may have been as much as €10) or a coin embossed with the head of the pope, the latter from a vending machine for a mere €2, no less.

The basilica is full of priceless artworks, as well as an artfully-lit scale model.

On the way to our next stop

Time to go! We grabbed some tasty sandwiches at the local Franprix, hopped on the next bus and enjoyed the ride down the stately Boulevards of Paris (including the Boulevard Saint-Michel, which I first heard of as a child in the evocative Peter Sarstedt song, where "my lovely" lived in a fancy apartment) past such sights as these.

This statue of Joan of Arc...

...and the Vendôme Column in the Place Vendôme....

We had not heard of the Flame of Liberty, a full-sized gold-leaf covered replica of the flame held by Liberty (of New York harbour entrance fame). The tour commentary pointed out that the flame has become an informal commemoration for Diana, Princess of Wales, as it is located at the entrance to the tunnel underneath the pont de l'Alma, where she died twenty years ago. The statue was actually given to the city of Paris in 1989 by the International Herald Tribune newspaper to celebrate its 1987 centenary of publishing an English-language newspaper in Paris. However, it was particularly poignant to pass by the statue close to the twentieth anniversary of her death in that tunnel.

Image credit: By Mbzt (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

We also passed the stalls of the famed bouquinistes, who have been selling books and prints by the banks of the Seine for centuries.

Now we were feeling thoroughly imbued with Paris. It was time for the Arc de Triomphe.

The Arc de Triomphe

Our next stop was at the Place de l'Etoile at the top of the Champs Élysées. There, like all the other tourists in a unity of purpose, we scampered to a central median where we took photos of each other with the Triumphal Arch in the background.

Twelve avenues disgorge and absorb traffic into and out of the Place and it looked like traffic was at least ten vehicles abreast with no visible lines or rules. The vehicles all made it through swimmingly, however for a pedestrian the best way to cross it to reach the Arc de Triomphe is to take the pedestrian underpass.

It's beautiful and stately

Which we did, and suddenly there we were. We wandered around outside, getting a feel for beautiful carvings on the exterior and the hundreds of names sculpted for posterity into the walls within the arch, then began the climb up to the inner display and ultimately the roof.

The spiral stairway inside is like a labyrinthine intestine of some stone creature of remembrance, digesting tourists and transforming them from happy snappers to temporarily thoughtful historians as they arrive at the inner deck, where there is a simple, moving global memorial to the Unknown Soldier.

It's a memorial to the Unknown Soldier

I always get deeply emotional at these memorials to (mostly) young men who died in wars past so that we might live in freedom. As I creep towards maturity, I find myself feeling completely and utterly indebted to these people whose deaths were so unnecessary, so unfair, so final, so destructive forever of family lines. And we keep finding cleverer ways to send young people to their deaths, so perhaps we're not doing that good a job of learning from the past.

It says, "To the unknown soldier of the Great War, respects from the whole world".

And beneath the centre of the arch, there is a grave of an unknown soldier, this time a French soldier who died in World War I, or as they called it at the time, the Great War, as they couldn't imagine anything that horrific ever happening again. The tomb inscription reads, "Here lies a French soldier who died for his country, 1914-1918".

Breathtaking 360° views of Paris

Then the tourists climb the final staircase to emerge on top of one of the world's most iconic structures, and from here we can grasp the genius of the urban planning which incorporated long, straight avenues running radially from this and other celebrated monuments. Here the almost claustrophobic contemplation of the Unknown Soldier memorial gives way to embracing the grandness of Paris.

Emma put together a panoramic view from two sides at a time, giving a sense of how the Avenues converge at the Arc de Triomphe.

I think this view incorporates, left to right or clockwise if you prefer, Avenues Hoche, de Friedland, the Champs-Élysées, Marceau and d'Iéna. Here's a map to help with orientation.

Image credit: By Paris 16 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Here's a more detailed view of the Champs Élysées from the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

And looking in the opposite direction, more or less northwest down Avenue de la Grande Armée towards La Défense.

I was dazzled by the hanging gardens of this building, and the elegantly manicured rooftop garden in the following photo, which also clearly shows Sacré Coeur poised at the top of Montmartre.

On our must see next time we go to Paris, because we must go back, is the breathtaking Frank Gehry designed Contemporary Arts Museum Building created for the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne. You can just see it peeking out from the trees just to the right of the centre of the upper image.

18 June 1940 - an important date in French history

This image is of the text of one of General Charles de Gaulle's greatest and most inspiring speeches, made from the BBC in London at the time that the French government was poised to surrender to advancing German forces. You can read an English translation and listen to the original recording here. Stirring stuff.

No visit to Paris would be complete without a stroll down the Champs Élysées

So stroll we did. And gawk. And weirdly, saw a tourist we'd seen near our Airbnb in the 14th two days before. He was unmistakable as the same person, as his face was fully tattooed and he was well-pierced.

Here's a sample of just one of the shops on the Champs.

The light rain and slight chill cranked up a yearning for a hot beverage, so we chose one of the sidewalk cafés and experienced the true thrill of a Parisian experience. Two of us ordered the most delicious, not too sweet, rather outrageously creamy hot chocolate of our lives, and the other finally received his capuccino as we were getting up to leave - so we won't be able to report on the quality of that beverage. Suffice it to say we thought the purveyors should stick to what they know best: French cars. Nuff said.

By this time we had also picked up that well-armed French soldiers were patrolling all the areas we were visiting. They patrolled on foot in a square formation. They weren't unfriendly, but their presence was a sobering reminder of the terrible experiences Paris has gone through in the past few years, and we appreciated their presence.

Eiffel Tower

Our next objective was in sight. The Eiffel Tower tour. We hopped off at the Trocadero across the river and wound our way down to the tower, allowing it to fill our fields of vision as we approached; allowing it to reveal the delicate and intricate details taking it beyond a structure to architectural masterpiece.

Between the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower, there is another carousel. Fun!

Getting in

Security was tight getting into the grounds, and we had a moment of high comedy when the security guard waved his metal detector wand over Tim's shorts and it wheeped as loudly as a metal detector can wheep. Even the security guard howled with laughter!

We walked around under the Tower for a while but didn’t feel like going up it – we’d had fabulous Paris views already and the Tower itself is one of the best views (and you can’t see it from inside). Here are some closeups to enjoy from underneath.

We looked back on the Eiffel Tower through the park area towards the Trocadero, where we had walked from.

Home

Then we boarded the Hop-On Hop-Off, which took us to the terminus on the Avenue de l’Opéra. A well-executed metro ride followed. After a quick walk back to the apartment, where we changed and changed shoes (ahhhhh), we hurtled off to the corner restaurant Les Rouquins which was mercifully open (yay!). There was no menu outside but an extremely friendly host, who it turns out had previously worked in Cape Town, seated us comfortably on the terrace and explained the inscrutable choices of the day for us. We feasted tapas-style on local delicacies, a perfect end to a Paris day.

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Images by @kiligirl, @tim-beck and Emma Beck except where otherwise credited.

Other posts to date on our trip:

https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/day-2-in-paris-for-team-beck-boat-cruise-down-the-seine
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/day-2-in-paris-for-team-beck-a-visit-to-the-louvre
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/two-weeks-ago-yesterday-we-were-wandering-around-the-centre-pompidou-in-paris
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/paris-day-1-part-2-of-several-posts-on-our-trip-to-paris-pas-de-calais-bruges-and-amsterdam
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/whirlwind-tour-of-paris-pas-de-calais-bruges-and-amsterdam

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