Bonjour Notre Dame

Today was a bit of a flop, we should have rested but I didn’t want to miss out on any more than we already have/will because of my injury so we headed back into the heart of Paris.
We woke up around 9 am to a grim breakfast of weet a bix with warm vanilla soy milk on a small flimsy plastic plate and ate with a spoon, smaller than a tea spoon. It made me think of prison food, and Nathan thought it looked like baby spew. Mmmm delicious...
We have no kitchen area in our apartment, no fridge or cutlery. So we had to make do with what we could find at the supermarket, our other option was to spend $23 each for an all you can eat buffet every morning. Bit to expensive for our likings.

We head off around 10.30, however, today we went the right way first time. Turning an hour journey to the train station into a 15 minute walk which took us a much prettier route, past some beautifully done graffiti and it felt a lot safer too.

We headed to Opera and jumped on a Hop on Hop off bus straight away. It was a 90 minute tour to do a loop, but we jumped off at the second stop, the Notre Dame.
It was so busy, the line to go inside was close to a kilometer long! No special treatment for being on crutches today, so we headed around the back, took some photos and went over to the bridge ‘PONT DE L’ARCHEVECHE’ behind Notre Dame and attached our padlock sealing our love forever. Every bridge around this area was covered in hundreds, even thousands of padlocks. Some so beautiful, made ours look a bit blah. Apparently this fad of putting a pad lock on the bridge with yours and your partners names, possibly a date or a message, only started taking off around 2008! Which was the last time I visited, and the bridges were near to empty in comparison.

People weren’t quite so rude today, but I was still forced onto the road once or twice because people are lazy and mean. I feel that because I don’t have a cast or a visible injury people have no sympathy. All I wanted to do was find a wheel chair and use my crutches to joust everyone out the way! As fun as it would have been, It would have made me as bad as them.

We were already hungry by this point, because of our poor effort of food for breakfast, so we headed to Subway! Along the way we walked past several small shop like stalls all selling the exact thing, padlocks, small Eiffel towers, postcards, overpriced paintings of women's bums, sex dice, posters of the Beetles and much more strange items.
We got to Subway, super excited, stepped in the door to see the workers were all young and speaking fluent French really quickly, there was a massive que and neither of us were game enough to attempt to order so we bailed, cyaaa.

We headed back over to Notre Dame to try again, the line was a lot smaller so we decided to go inside. Only took us 10 minutes to get in, didn’t have to pay, but there was a sign saying beware of pick pockets so that made us nervous.
It was beautiful on the inside, although a little dull and boring. However, we did learn that the Notre Dame was started in the 1100’s and finished in the 1800’s! Insane. The progression through the ages was incredible. Half way through there was a loud noise that echoed throughout the room, “Shhhhhhhhh!”
“Is that a shush?” I asked Nathan,
“Can’t be its too long” He replied.
It was a shush, a shush that lasted close to 30 seconds. The longest shush I have ever heard.

(I originally wrote: ‘Through the years was incredible’ but Nathan demanded some input into the blog and made me change ’years’ to ‘ages’. Fantastic amount of input! hehe)
We were going to attempt to walk to the top of the Notre Dame, but the gate closed 20 minutes after we got there for 2 & 1/2 hours. We were gutted! Probably a good thing looking back I'm almost certain there wouldn't of been a lift for me.
We needed some comfort food so across the road we brought ourselves a delicious looking hot dog and chicken sandwich. Unfortunately, the bread was so chewy it could have been at least a day old. It felt as if I was chewing through an old shoe, but we were so hungry we soldiered on.
We decided to leave for the hop on hop off bus as we just weren’t having much luck.
Right out the front of the Notre Damn, down some stairs which look like they lead to a train station was the archaeology crypte, basically all the history of how the city of Paris came to be and foundation stones of the Notre Dame.
It was interesting, not 7 euros interesting, but if you enjoy history it’s worth a look.
After hobbling around for 15 minutes we found the bus stop for the hop on hop off bus. We jumped on at sat up top to enjoy the rest of the tour which took us around all of Paris.
Just after the Eiffel tower Nathan turns to me and says,
“I want to see the statue of Liberty! Where is she?”
I thought he was bonkers and we argued for a while about it, turns out he’s not completely wrong, there is a 6 foot tall bronze statue of her and a 35 foot tall one that you can apparently see from the Eiffel tower!

Today, we saw many police officers, all on different forms of transport! Roller blades, motorcycles, bicycles, on foot, cars (Which look almost friendly in comparison to police cars in Australia) vans and horses! We also saw many group tours around Paris, which would have been fun, there were buses, walking tours, bicycle tours, even segway tours!

We jumped off the bus at Opera, this had become our base in Paris. It was easy to get to and from via train, it was only 11 stops back to our hotel and we didn’t have to change trains.
Hobbling back, hands now close to blistering and feeling bruised from the crutches, arms sore, I begged Nathan to buy me some juice. He reminds me how close we are to the hotel, I give up 100 meters away and he pulls out some water, he was testing me to see how far I could go! As horrible as it sounds, it was funny at the time.
Although we did arrive back at the hotel exhausted and dehydrated. We lay down to watch a movie, I don’t usually make it through movies but it was even harder to stay awake when your bed feels like a giant marshmallow! So i passed out fairly quickly.
However, I kept waking up drenched in sweat, I was dazed and couldn’t figure out where I was. Nathan went out to get some food and came back with spinach, cheese and ham and made some sandwiches for dinner. It was heavenly, but I still couldn’t get my temperature down. I was shaking with cold, but burning up. I think I got heat stroke. I woke up several times with drool all over my pillow, vision blurry and needing water. It was not a good time.
After a solid 12 hour sleep and a fair amount of water i’m feeling a lot better.
We left the hotel yesterday with two bottles of water, it didn’t click until we got home that they were only 200ml and that was no where near enough for two people for a day.
Lesson learnt.