Versailles

We are now in the high season for tourism in Paris, and I am constantly amazed at the number of people visiting the city.  While I hate fighting the crowds, a lot of the places that are packed with tourists really are amazing.  One place that we've visited that was absolutely mobbed even in the off-season, but was also totally worth it, was the Château de Versailles.  

Versailles is on the RER (commuter rail) train line and is only half an hour from central Paris.  The entrance is just a short walk from the Versailles Rive-Gauche train station, and when we turned the corner onto the street that leads up to the palace I was immediately struck by the immense size of the palace.

The model of the palace shows the scale of the building in a way that a single picture really can't. The corner of the building and fence captured in the picture above are just a small fraction of the overall footprint.  We saw several shots of the palace from helicopters covering the final stage of the Tour de France last weekend and I was reminded again of how huge the building and grounds are.

After two trips to Versailles, one during the week and one on the weekend, I would definitely recommend visiting on a weekday if possible.  Despite having purchased our tickets in advance, we still had to wait for 45 minutes in a line that wrapped around the palace's courtyard four times.  Regardless of the crowds, the palace is truly remarkable.

On our second trip, we left the tour bus crowds behind and visited the vast gardens and other parts of the property, including the Trianons and Marie Antoinette's hamlet.  The Trianons were smaller, private (but still extremely luxurious) retreats from the main palace.  The hamlet was a working farm built for Marie Antoinette, who would go to experience an idealized royal version of "peasant life".

Amsterdam

We may have had a little trouble getting back to Paris, but other than that our trip to Amsterdam was excellent.  We had delicious Indonesian food (Indonesia was a Dutch colony at one time), were able to meet up with my brother and sister-in-law for dinner (they were visiting Amsterdam the same weekend), visited the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Anne Frank house, and brought home some delicious Dutch cheeses.

7 hours, 2 trips to Brussels, and 1 alarming boxed lunch

We took the train up to Amsterdam earlier this month, had a lovely (if cold) weekend, and were happily headed back to Paris when we had our first real mishap after almost two years of train travel.

We were over halfway to Paris, somewhere in rural Belgium just a few miles from the French border, when our train came to an abrupt stop.  There was a series of vague announcements about there being something wrong with the train, but it was a little hard to understand because one of the people delivering the messages did not speak French or English very well (the announcements are given in Dutch, French, and English on this line) and the other person spoke so quietly you could not really hear what they were saying.  What we could figure out was that they did not know how long we would be stopped and that all of the electricity on the train had been turned off, meaning that we were without functioning bathrooms and air conditioning.  Despite my many complaints about the lack of hot weather in northern Europe, even I did not enjoy sitting in the hot train car.

They managed to restart the electrical system on the train and decided to try going back to Brussels, which we had passed through earlier. There was an engine on each end of the train and the unused engine on the back seemed to still be working, so we were able to go backwards.  We made it to Brussels, stocked up on food and water, and they decided the engine that pulled us there would be able to make it to Paris.  This meant that we got a little tour of the outskirts of Brussels as we looped around to get the train turned around and heading south.

Part of our stop in Brussels involved the train stocking up on free meals for all of the passengers.  Our train had left a little after 2 pm and we expected to be home before 6 pm, but by the time we left Belgium for the second time it was after 7:30 pm and we were getting hungry.  J picked up our boxed meals in the bar car of the train and we excitedly opened them up. . .

. . . to find an odd assortment of things, including a jar of salmon rillettes (sort of like paté),

and a disgusting canned tuna salad.

After so many hours with people stuck on the train, part of the time without air conditioning, it was already little stuffy.  The addition of so many open cans of dubious tuna salad did nothing to help the atmosphere.  We were really glad to get off the train when we finally made it back to Paris.

Lisbon

After spending a few days in Porto in May, we took the train to Lisbon and had fun revisiting a few favorite places from our honeymoon as well as discovering some new spots.

The center of town is a valley between two hills.  We spent a peaceful afternoon wandering around the Castelo de São Jorge, an 11th-century castle on top of one of the hills.  The views over the city were spectacular and the weather was perfect.

We also took a trip out to Belém, a neighborhood west of the city center.  Bélem is home to a number of interesting spots, including a gorgeous monastery, the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, and a bakery famous for making custard tarts.  When we got back to Paris we were excited to find a Portuguese store in the market area near our apartment that sells the same kind of tarts.  They are delicious!

The monastery is situated across a park from the Tagus River, which runs past Lisbon out to the Atlantic.  Many of the Portuguese explorers set off on their journeys in this area.  Their contributions are memorialized by the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, a large riverside monument featuring statues of some of those explorers, such as Ferdinand Magellan and Vasco de Gama.

We had a great time climbing up and down hills around the city, soaking in the sunshine and enjoying the break from Paris's cool, rainy spring.

Summer is finally here

I've mentioned before that, lacking any sort of private outdoor space, we use the city as our backyard.  This weekend it looked like everyone else had the same idea.  The weather has warmed up and it finally feels like summer.

We were up near the Canal St-Martin for dinner on Saturday and the canal area was so crowded with people that they spilled over from the banks of the canal, covering the stairs of the bridges and the little pieces of land that you can only access by hopping a fence!

We had a picnic dinner in one of our favorite spots along the Seine on Sunday and the river banks were almost as crowded as the canal had been the night before.  There were even several areas where people were congregating for different types of dancing.  We did not join in the dancing, but we were serenaded by a group of musicians (three guitarists and someone playing a soprano saxophone) hanging out nearby.