Beautiful day – what a disappointment!

We’ve had flawless days for the whole trip, and that trend continued today. I have to tell you, though, the whole day turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.

Now, I know everything is relative – boo hoo, Fred was disappointed in Paris, my heart weeps… but bear with me.

We decided to do one of my most favourite things, which was take the Batou-Bus cruise on the Seine River. We started out doing so and managed to catch one that was all ready moored, so things started off pretty smoothly. We went around to the Grand Palais in order to finally see the Monet exhibit.

What a mistake.

This exhibit is the largest collection (over 200 works) ever assembled in one place. We ended up lining up for over TWO HOURS (from 11am to 1pm) just to GET IN and see the show. We were lucky that there were some Americans and a British person with us, and between the 5 of us we had a nice conversation. I kept saying to Paul – this sign says “It’s a 2 hour wait from this sign to get in,” but he just sort of kept ignoring me, so we inched along and inched along, in order to pay to get in and view the exhibit. The exhibit was impressive, and I was pleased to see works from both the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery in Ottawa included… but you know what – 200 works is just too darned big. It took hours to view it properly ( we like to take the audio guide to get the most out of the exhibit, so it takes longer to view). So, at 4 o’clock, and without any lunch we broke our rule about not eating out at places we don’t know, and stopped into a nearby café for some thing to eat and drink. I had a sandwich with some French fries and Paul had a pizza slice. We shared a half bottle of wine and some water – and the bill came to 40E – or 56 Canadian dollars. I HATE paying through the nose for mediocre food, and this epitomized it. NEVER AGAIN!

Despite the late time, we walked back to the banks of the Seine and hopped back on the Batou bus with a view to doing nothing other than getting back to our stop (Notre Dame) and getting back into our apartment. After enjoying the tour including a stop at the base of the Eiffel Tower, somewhere around the St Germain des Pres stop, something went wrong with the motor on the bus and it spewed out a MASSIVE cloud of black diesel fumes laced with soot which – you guessed it – landed all over my jacket (the windows were open because of the nice weather) which is now plastered with smudged black soot.

We hadn’t laid in any groceries for our supper, so I kindly let Paul stay at home while I headed out to a traiteur to get something in for our supper.

Of course, he didn’t like what I brought home (note – he didn’t go out and get it himself).

I’m calling it a day. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

At least “Master Chef” France is on TV tonight.