Today was a long and interesting day of contrasts, starting with moving from the Right Bank, the land of the Ritz, the grand Palais Garnier opera house, and the Place Vendome, to the Left Bank, where we had a more modest hotel, a great medieval museum, the Quartier Latin and the Luxembourg Gardens.
The first order of business was to move to Hotel Albe and store our bags there until check-in time. The hotel is in a great location, walking distance to Ile-de-France and Notre Dame to the north, the Luxembourg Gardens to the south, the Latin Quarter to the east, and the Faubourg-Saint-Germain to the west. And there's a late-night convenience store just outside the door to the left and great patisserie to the right, and a taxi stand two minutes away!
While we waited for check-in time, we visited the Musee Cluny, the best museum of medieval culture and history in the world. to a hotspot of culture and nightlife on Montmartre.
We explored the Musee Cluny and the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries early. Lorna and I had seen the Unicorn in Captivity tapestry series years earlier at the Cloisters in Manhattan and we'd been eager to see these as well. There's something very calming about these tapestries; when you live in an old castle the tapestries help to hold warmth and reduce drafts, but a heavy rug could do that. People spent much time and money to make these beautiful and calming in an age of violence and uncertainty.
In the gift shop I found two roemers! They were in two sizes and they had only one of each. I bought both and the gift-shop lady told me where the maker (Verreries de Lumieres ) is, a taxi drive away.
We got back to the hotel and checked in without incident. Then we took a taxi by way of the glassmaker, where I bought two more roemers, and up to the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur, at the top of Montmartre. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening exploring the steep winding streets and alleys of Montmartre. You can see here a long stairway from one street to the next. As evening came, there were dozens of local running clubs appearing from everywhere, running en masse up and down these broad stairways! By then we'd been walking for hours; we just got out of the way.
At Montmartre, Melissa had many fond memories of an earlier visit, and Lorna had some too, but things had changed. We wandered about the streets and the women had omelettes for lunch at The Consulate; I drank lots of water.
We walked the overrated Rue de l'Abrevoir and Melissa fondled Dalida’s brass boob for luck. We saw a sexy old 1969 Citroen DS struggling to navigate the tight uphill narrow roads, and we saw many more gardens and stairs. The Dali Museum was closed. Then we descended many stairs to another dining area with minimal shopping.
For dinner we started with three tropical smoothies (tree-tomato, lulo, maracuya) at a Colombian place called Comptoir Latino to recharge until the dinner places opened, then we went to the Crêperie Rozell Café where they had nutella-strawberry crêpes (see the butterflies!) and I had a Breton-Morbihan galette “la Guéméné . This is something that I might have had in southern Brittany if the restaurant had been open when we were there. I was lucky to find it in Paris! It's thin-sliced smokey Andouille de Guéméné, a specialty of southern Brittany, in a light cream sauce and served in a galette, which in this context is a buckwheat crêpe. Galettes are for savory fillings.
As dusk approached we were plagued by those runners, individually and in teams. We headed over to the famous old nightclub Au Lapin Agile where I had reservations for that evening. Some of the daytime people were heading back down the hill towards the Seine. It's a nice walk that Lorna and I had done on our first visit to Paris 10 years earlier, but this night we had plans that I really did not want to miss. The Lapin Agile is not a disco, they have a gang of local musicians who perform traditional and popular songs together and solo. There's a piano player, and the gang sits around one of the tables in the middle of the room. There's just one room and it fills up so reservations are required.
The piano player plays and the gang, singly or together sing the songs that everyone knows. They encourage sing-alongs and they clearly had a lot of locals because they all seemed to know the tunes and the lyrics. We just listened. One of them, a pretty young brunette, did a set of five solo pieces, some but not all of them accompanied by the piano, nobody sang along with those pieces. It was nice that all night we didn't hear La Vie En Rose, which we'd heard in seemingly every shop and Cafe in Paris!
They serve their own housemade cherry cordial, which was refreshing until it put Lorna to sleep, but for days after Melissa and I were ear-bombing each other with Les Champs-Elysees - what an evening!