We awoke at a reasonable time, seemingly having had our clocks fully re-set by the previous night's long sleep and/or melatonin, and went downstairs to look for the continental breakfast.

We found it in a deep and dimly lit basement underneath the hotel. The arched stone surface that comprised one wall and the ceiling made it appear to be more of a cave than a room, while the starkness and quarter-cylinder shape of the chamber made it seem a noticeable oversight that there was no yellow triple-diamond "fallout shelter" sign in evidence.

The room was crowded at this time of morning and echoing loudly with the sounds of an endless stream of elbow-jostling guests and tourists constantly arriving and leaving, but always managing at any given time to number three or four more than the number of chairs in the room. It was as if the chairs and tables could accommodate more diners than their capacity by constantly shuffling them, in the manner of a juggler controlling a dozen objects at once with just two hands.

The self-serve breakfast was sparse, but adequate: thin baguettes of crusty French bread to be spread with pre-packaged individual serving cheeses, croissants with butter, weak orange juice and strong coffee, several cold cereals and milk, and a steam tray that was supposed to contain eggs and bacon, and did have some bacon.

The bacon didn't look very cooked (certainly not to a Midwesterner who expects it crispy) and was, in the French style, more like sliced ham than like what we think of as bacon. It looked too greasy to appeal to me early in the morning. I found the eggs intermittently available, undercooked, and not worth the effort given how much better the cold breakfast selections were.

For the first of several mornings, I marvelled at how this fairly small and simple buffet, tended by the full attentions of a hotel staff member who looked quite busy at all times, could always be in a state of lacking of some vital dish, condiment, or utensil. It never failed that one would find it necessary to spread cheese with a spoon, stir sugar into the coffee with a knife, or fetch a plate from one's table because the buffet was out of them, or go back halfway through breakfast to get the orange juice. But, after sufficient shuffling and creative re-use of plates and utensils, we had a good, satisfying breakfast, and returned to our room pleased, if somewhat disoriented by the experience.

A quick shower, and we were off to the Métro again. Instead of our "usual" Métro station, Tuileries, we walked a few blocks down to the next one, Palais Royal, directly in front of the Louvre. As with most things in the area, it turned out to be not as far as we'd thought, and because the Métro line we wanted came here, it saved us a transfer. It was also a pleasant walk and we were delighted to see a bit more of the neighborhood, the little shops on one side and the Louvre and Tuileries gardens on the other. Palais Royal was one of the old Métro stations with the little "serpent" streetlights over the quaint steel sign inscribed in a fancy script with the simple word: "Métropolitain."

By now we were feeling like old hands at riding the Métro, but still making some new discoveries here and there. Such as the revelation that you can buy Toblerone in the vending machines on the train platform, yum! And perhaps more telling about French culture, the observation you can buy condoms in the vending machines mounted openly on the walls in the main pedestrian traffic corridors. Oh, if you were wondering, the French word is: "preservatifs."

A very quick trip—we hadn't even left the district our hotel was in, the 1er Arrondissement—put us at Les Pyramides, on l'avenue de l'Opéra, a wide and bustling shopping street. It shouldn't be a surprise that on this street we saw the great ornate complex of the Paris Opera, which we appreciated all the more for having seen its cross-sectional model in the architecture exhibit at the Musée d'Orsay the day before. We stopped for some quick pictures.

A quick walk up l'Avenue de l'Opéra and we found a Monoprix, which I suppose is most easily described as the local equivalent of a Woolworth's. We had been alerted by a guidebook that Monoprix is a place where, in addition to a variety of "sundries," locals on a budget always find surprisingly nice clothing at the lowest prices in town. This turned out to be absolutely true, and I was particularly impressed with the low-priced sweaters of real lamb's wool. I don't really like to wear wool, though, and with Shari's help I selected instead a velvety-soft chenille one in multiple shades of gray that had caught her eye first, then mine.

I was also on the lookout for a new wristwatch: my trusted plastic Casio, which I count on as my travel alarm and which is particularly well suited for such trips as this because of its time-zones-of-the-world display, had gone to its own demise with the same impeccable timing with which it had lived. Appropriately to the years of hard knocks it had survived, seeing me through trips to Europe and Asia and many places in between, it met its final fate on the airplane on the way over the Atlantic. The watches at Monoprix were not spectacular, were priced the same as anywhere else, and were buried in a glass case the opening of which would require the remarkable feat of finding a clerk. I decided to pass, and just bought the sweater and a little pocket-sized notepad, which I used the rest of the week to record information about the film I exposed and to make brief notes to be used later for this travelogue.

After leaving Monoprix, we decided to look for a small shop that was in this district that was said to have an outstanding selection of postcards. Shari had the directions safely ensconced in her palm pilot, but it turned out to be quite a trek. We knew the shop would be in an alley off the main street, but each time we turned onto yet a smaller strip of pavement thinking it was the alley, it turned out that there was yet another turn onto yet another, still smaller, strip of pavement. Sort of an alley-off-of an-alley-off-of- an-alley. I wondered if we had gotten lost in a fractal.

It was a rather irritating trip, actually. Not only was it, for a change, much farther than we expected, but the sidewalks were so narrow two people could not walk abreast, and were made narrower still by construction scaffolds that dripped water on us to add insult to injury. The two foot wide passages left for pedestrians were crowded with a constant stream of TWO-WAY traffic. In such situations, the French literally shove past one another and anybody else who happens to be in the way, turning the mildly inconvenient into the truly insufferable. Also, since we didn't know where we were going, we had to keep up a constant stream of what any conversation degenerates into when walking one ahead of the other in such a crowd: "WHAT?? WHAAAATTTT????? WHAAAAAAAT? I can't hear you!!!!, what did you say? I just asked what you said!." The threshold of physical pain for maintaining such banter was found to be something less than two minutes.

The "passage" (two sizes smaller than an alley) on which the postcard shop was located was a blissful relief. There was much less traffic there, and most of the postcard racks were outside on the sidewalk, allowing elbow room to peruse them. The narrowness of the "passage" also helped by blocking the cold wind and making it quite a pleasant place to stand around for a few minutes. And the postcards themselves amounted to a truly remarkable collection. We admired and stocked up.

On our slog back to Avenue de l'Opéra, we took a respite from the mobbed sidewalk to go into a small post office we had noticed there on outbound trip, hoping to get some stamps for sending home some of the postcards we had just bought. We watched the people and read the signs, trying to figure out the stamp machine, and I did a quick check of my dictionary. When the friendly clerk asked if she could help us, I managed one of the most sophisticated (yet still wrong) bits of French I put together the entire trip: "combien de timbres faut-il pour envoyer une carte postale aux états-unis?." The problem with such a question was that I was in no way prepared to understand the answer, which of course was a long and incomprehensible muddle to me. She saw my confusion and helpfully added "four forty" in English. A stamp to the USA costs 4.4 Francs—somewhere around 65-75 cents—and seems to be the same for either a letter or a postcard. OK. She also asked if we had "money," which I decided was the word "Monnaie," which is not money but CHANGE. Money is "l'argent." We had some change, so, back to the machine. The machine seemed to dispense postage meter-strips, which was a forehead-smacker for me—that's so much more sensible and so much more general-purpose than US machines which sell stamps and so have to offer many choices of denominations, yet never a combination that adds up to exactly what you need. But, the place was a bit too crowded to get the few minutes alone with the machine we would have liked to parse all the instructions, and we decided we didn't have enough change anyway, so we just left.

Back at l'Avenue de l'Opéra, we hopped on the Métro again and soon arrived at our afternoon destination, the Notre Dame area. Notre Dame is on what is technically an island in the Seine. "Technically" because it isn't very isolated and so doesn't feel that much like an island. The Seine is narrow here, since it splits in half to fork around the island, and the connecting bridges are only long enough for about six cars to park along the curb. Add to that the facts that the island is only 4-6 blocks wide, and just about every street has a connecting bridge, and it is clear why there seems to be just as much through traffic here as in any other neighborhood in the center of the city.

Lunch was found at another crêpe stand, but this time we went for the other category of crêpes, the non-sweet ones. Shari had a ham and cheese crêpe, while I had one with just the cheese. Shari succeeded in obtaining a diet coke (the French call it "coca cola light," but I have no idea how a Frenchman would pronounce "light," so we just said "diet coke" and the guy knew what we wanted). The cheese crêpe was excellent—a soft mild gruyere—and my only complaints were that it stuck to the paper wrap like crazy, and that it was too cold and windy right there by the Seine to be very pleasant to sit on a bench long enough to eat. Especially once we found out, too late, that the morning drizzle had left the bench wetter than it looked.

After the crêpe stand, we experimented with a Parisian coin-operated toilet kiosk on the sidewalk. I found it clean and efficient, if small. I had used similar units in London and San Francisco, so I pretty much knew what to expect. Shari was less impressed, finding it a bit off-putting that some important surfaces stay quite wet from when the unit cleans itself between uses. These little units certainly compare favorably against an airplane's bathroom, but that isn't saying very much. We were thankful for the function and the fact that it got us both out of the cold wind for a few minutes, one inside the unit and the other standing on its leeward side. We left there ready to continue our adventure.

After some wrong turns, each of which seemed to lead to some interesting random architectural discoveries, we found it: le cathedral de Notre Dame de Paris. From the side where we approached, a street passed directly beside the building just like any other, and other than the telltale gargoyles near the top, it didn't look old enough to seem out of place. We circled the building looking for the entrance, and finding a pretty little park, a lovely view up and down the Seine, and a fascinating close-up look at the cathedral's flying buttresses, but no entrance. Finally after going around the cathedral 359.9 degrees, we found two of the biggest queues of humanity we'd ever seen—one for "le crèche" (the nativity scene in a tent in the little square in front of the cathedral) and the other for the cathedral itself.

Standing off at a distance and looking at the doorway and the queue to enter, it appeared there were two separate lines joining near what could have been one or two entrance doors, so naturally we joined the shorter line. It turned out as we shoved and prodded through the densest pack of humanity physically possible without medical intervention, that we were in a group of bargers who had simply decided that it was less expedient to wait in line than to push their way in near the front. This was the first of several examples that would give us another valuable insight the guidebooks never revealed: the French are not big believers in standing in line.

Once inside the huge and dark cathedral itself, we passed strikingly large scale versions of all of the usual features found in such Catholic places. Immense stands filled with burning tea-light candles placed by the faithful, little alcoves paying tribute to particular saints and in some cases enshrining their bones, rows of wooden wall-alcoves whose purpose I have never understood, and so on. For me, such artifacts are always a shocking reminder that in our day and age, both ancestor worship and worship of idols are thriving in such a seemingly mainstream group as the Catholic church.

I found the cathedral to be quite similar to what I had come to expect from visiting such places as Westminster Abbey and the cathedral whose name I have forgotten where Charles and Diana held their wedding, and even the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in San Francisco. To the cursory glance, the primary impressive feature of such places is the sheer size. The ceilings must be at least four or five stories up, far enough to lose all sense of perspective of them, and the stained glass windows at that height seem small, yet somehow visually convey the fact that each must be large enough to cover an entire wall of a normal church. A more detailed look around a cathedral such as this reveals layer upon layer of fascinating details. Ancient pews and carvings, statues and paintings of amazing intricacy and craftsmanship, artful details in the little shrines to different saints, whole stories told in the panels of glittering stained glass, and abundant historical finds are among the rewards for those who take the time to look for them.

Unfortunately, the appreciation of such details, as well as the general ambience of awe of such places, was mostly lost to us as we pushed, shoved, and jostled through endless throngs of noisy, yakking tourists, who let their screaming children run wild as they worked as a relay team to fade the thousand-year-old paintings and carvings with the continuously popping flash bulbs of their little plastic cameras.

Besides being a tourist attraction, Notre Dame is also, more than just nominally, a working church, and we felt truly sorry for those who sat in roped-off central sections of pews attempting to have actual services as the relentless rivers of tourists clattered past on all sides. We felt sorrier still for anyone who had come here from far away as a religious pilgrimage, as no doubt many do.

Having done the complete loop through the cathedral, we found a gift stand near the front exit, where Shari bought some postcards. I pondered some transparent images that were mounted into the counter top and lit from behind, but I couldn't tell if they were selling slides (which I would have wanted) or if this was just some kind of display for images that might be on posters or cards or transparencies or something. I later figured out that they really had been slides, and had even been labeled as such in both French and English. The French word for slides is "les diapositifs," which translates to English as a cognate: "diapositives." I had never heard such a word, and as far as I know, even the Brits don't use it. But there it is, an annoying but correct part of our language. As my Mom says, one of the most annoying things about French is how you will often look up a word in the French-English dictionary only to find out it is a perfect cognate for the exact same word in English, and you still have no idea what it means.

We crowded our way out the door of Notre Dame into the blinding light of the day's dull overcast, and, without a clear destination really in mind, began walking. After a long and fairly exhausting trek off the island and down the Seine, punctuated by a frantic search for bathrooms, we found a Métro station and returned home for an afternoon rest.

Around 6 p.m., we left our hotel room for one of the few things we actually had pre-scheduled and booked: a package that consisted of "illuminations" (a bus tour of the lighted monuments of the city) and a boat ride up and down the Seine. We were less excited about this than some of the other things we had planned, but it was essentially free to us, having been part of our package deal. Although we had chosen this from among several options, we had done so only as a side effect: we had chosen a particular option because we wanted the 5-day museum pass, and the bus-tour/boat-ride thing had incidentally been part of that same option.

The bus-tour company doing the tour turned out to be just a block from our hotel, and we got there well ahead of time, as the paperwork said, to exchange our voucher for tickets. The staff gave us a dumb look and told us that that tour had left an hour ago—they decided to run their tours at a different time in the winter without bothering to feed that information back through British Airways Holidays so that it might percolate into our paperwork. They asked if we could come back the next night or another night, so we agreed to try again the next night, but noticed that they made no attempt to make any record or notation of any kind to show that we had ever been there or that there were two more "heads" slated for the next night's tour.

Confused, but not very perturbed since we hadn't cared much about the bus/boat tour in the first place, we plunged down the stairs into the Métro with renewed vigor, deciding that our immediate destination would be a point which was across the river from the Eiffel Tower, but which the guidebook said offered the best view of it. I had my camera and little tripod in hand already, having planned to attempt nighttime pictures from the river boat tour, so I thought I would have even more fun directing my lens at the lights of the tower.

We emerged from the Métro with little idea which direction to go, and having forgotten our map. Oops. A bus stop right there had a shelter with a street map posted, which gave us a pointer, and after walking only a few yards, realized that we were in a can't-miss situation—had we not come out of the Métro right behind a building, we would have seen the Eiffel Tower immediately.

A hundred yards more found us at a place called "le Trocadero," in what was surely The Spot for viewing the tower—on a raised stone plaza set part way up a hillside, a field full of fountains below our feet, with the Seine and the Tower immediately past that. A large group of mostly tourists had congregated there, and there was a regular but mostly useless popping of flashbulbs. On the cobblestones of the plaza, vendors had spread out blankets covered with little Eiffel Tower models, T-shirts, coffee cups, and the like, and two little flanking crêpe stands looked like they would stay open all night.

I set my little tripod down on the wide top of the stone wall, finding it conveniently close to eye level that way without even extending the legs, and took some long exposures of the Eiffel Tower at night. Hopefully these will record a one-time event never to be repeated: this side of the Eiffel Tower sported a large illuminated sign halfway up, which read: "J-368 avant l'an 2000," which places these pictures on exactly the date they were taken, just a few days before New Year's 1999.

This was obviously the very location from which my friend Piaw had taken some stunning long-exposure pictures showing the lights of traffic making pretty streaks under the lighted curves of the Eiffel Tower, one of which had been chosen for publication in the monthly contest of a UK photography magazine. I had no desire to duplicate that photograph and wouldn't have been able to in any event, but it did motivate me to try to get a different view from what Piaw had seen, to render the same thing with a different creative vision. So, I tried a few different compositions and exposures, mostly trying for a less close-up, more "tower in its surroundings" sort of view.

By this time we were hungry, so we decided to go to the Champs Elysées to see the Arc de Triomphe and have dinner at a nice restaurant there which, uncharacteristically for the area, was not a horrible tourist trap, at least according to a guide book in which we had come to have some trust.

The Arc de Triomphe sits in the center of a giant "star": the wide traffic circle right around the arch connects five major thoroughfares that radiate from it. The largest of the five, of course, is Elysian Fields Ave., better known by its French name: l'Avenue des Champs Elysées. We disembarked from the Métro here, at the aptly named station "Charles de Gaulle - Etoile."

The street map shows a confusing array of Métro stations surrounding the star on all sides, and when we got there, we found out why. In essence, there is a giant subterranean complex housing a large transfer point for several Métro lines, which seems to have its centroid DIRECTLY UNDER the Arc de Triomphe. Tunnels radiate in a dizzying array of directions from there, passing underneath the traffic circle and emerging at your choice of stairways on any side of the circle you wish. It seems likely, though we didn't prove it, that a pedestrian wishing to cross could even use this network of tunnels, without first having a ticket for the Métro, to simply get underneath the traffic and re-emerge on the other side. My engineering judgment would question the wisdom of building large excavations directly under a monument of such importance, but it's been there long enough that I suppose it must be solid.

We looked at the Arc for a while, lit up in its nightly splendor, and I took some long-exposure photographs, some of which I had to try several times because they kept getting ruined by tourists walking gaily in front of my tripod during, say, the 20th-28th seconds of my 30-second exposure.

While there, we were able to confirm firsthand a fairly subtle point that had we would have missed had it not been mentioned to me once by a French teacher back in high school: contrary to intuition, the cars in the traffic circle do not have right of way, but must yield to cars entering the circle from any side. As might be expected, this caused the traffic to move in epileptic fits and starts, but to my surprise it didn't seem to snarl completely. In England, on other trips, I had discovered that traffic circles make remarkably smooth and efficient intersections most of the time, but do have some very ugly failure modes. Under certain traffic conditions, endless traffic from one busy thoroughfare can swamp the shared resource of the circle itself, completely preventing any traffic coming from any other direction from ever getting a turn. Around the Arc de Triomphe, traffic from five major streets connected, each to the other four, in a very small space without any traffic lights or signals, and despite the herky-jerky flow, I couldn't imagine any American-style intersection that would work in such a small space, let alone one that could equal the throughput I was seeing. Maybe there's method to the madness after all!

We proceeded up the Champs Elysées a few blocks, admiring the Christmas lights that decorated the trees and shops lining the wide boulevard. Our restaurant turned out to be on the other side of the exceptionally wide street, but that was not a big deal.

In this case, we _DIS_proved something an old French teacher had said, or perhaps found that it had been changed in the years since then. She had related at great length the story and etiquette of how pedestrians cross the Champs Elysées. According to the French teacher, Paris is amply stocked with little old ladies, each with a giant shopping bag in each hand. These old ladies decide they wish to cross, stop at the curb until they have decided that the cars have had a fair turn, then put their heads down and step blindly off the curb, trudging resolutely across the street as the cars come screeching and skidding to a halt all around them. The correct etiquette that had evolved, even among distinguished-looking groups of businessmen and the like, was to congregate behind a little old lady and follow her across the street. Alas, I was denied a chance to prove our superiority over the rest of the tourists by knowing this point of local savior-faire, as this colorful tale was not borne out by direct observation. The Champs Elysées, at least at this end, had pedestrian crossing points, complete with signals and crosswalks. We availed ourselves of one and crossed to find the restaurant (Chez Clement) we were seeking, perused its menu, and found it to be acceptable.

Dinner was reasonably uneventful, since we had by this time figured out most of the obvious pitfalls of dining in France, and because the waiters here were quite used to American tourists. Upon hearing a few words of our mangled French, they chose to address us in English. They even had an English menu for us.

There were, however, a couple of highlights and lowlights. The lowlight was when Shari ordered a dinner that came with a salad and never got the salad. I speculated that in France the salad might appear AFTER the main course, but since it didn't appear then either, I think it was just a screw-up—unless our complaining to the waiter about it caused it to be cancelled entirely. It reminded me how very much you must be "just along for the ride" in a foreign country, unable through ignorance of local customs and language barriers to really complain or challenge anything effectively yet within the bounds of locally acceptable behavior.

Shari used the magical survival phrase that had served us so well up until now: "Une Carafe de l'eau ordinaire, s'il vous plait." But this time the waiter responded in a way that baffled both of us. He said: "wizz gauze?" After we went through several repetitions of "pardon?" and "wizz gauze!," I still had no idea what he said, but was trying to think what a carafe of water could possibly come with—nothing but lemon twists came to mind. Well, that and some unappetizing images of a gently-unfurling roll of gauze resting at the bottom of a water pitcher, but I tried not to dwell on that.

Well, we had to get this show moving and whatever it was, it didn't seem like it could be much harm if the water came with something, so I finally said "yes," and the waiter bustled off. Several long seconds later, it dawned on both of us what I had just done. Sure enough, we were brought two glasses and a one-liter bottle of Pellegrino—our water was "with gas." Fortunately, it just tasted like water with some fizz, not the very-acidic taste I had expected, so it was quite drinkable. I looked it up later to confirm what I thought: the French word for "gas" is "gaz." Which, of course, my dictionary would expect one to pronounce in the British style: "gahs." We had been HAD by another cognate!

Something else amusing happened to me on the way back from the rest rooms at the restaurant. I happened to see the pay phones. I had thought that France eliminated phone books years ago with their computer-based "Minitel" system, but clearly I misunderstood, for here were piles of phone books. I had to laugh out loud when I saw the one on top, because it was entitled: "Les Pages Jaunes."

After dinner and some very fine desserts, we re-emerged onto the Champs Elysées. Entranced by the symmetry and sparkle of the Christmas lights, I set my tripod back up and took a few pictures just looking down the street. In both directions, actually, since each end was capped with its spectacular sight: the Arc de Triomphe at the near end, and a huge lighted Ferris wheel at the far end. This was clearly within a block or two of a spot where Piaw had taken another outstanding long-exposure photo, this one showing the light-streaks of traffic coming and going to and from the Arc de Triomphe. With hearty approval from Shari, I decided that my dedication to photography wasn't as great as Piaw's, and that getting a similar photo wasn't worth the risk to life and limb of standing so long in the middle of the street, despite the partial protection of a pedestrian island. Besides, it had been done. So I again captured instead some different perspectives of the same area, trying to use a few elements to capture the mood of the place.

Pleasantly full but not stuffed nor sleepy, as we had come to expect after a good French meal, we wandered down the Champs Elysées with no particular destination until random chance inevitably brought us to a Métro station and its welcome relief from the chill wind. A quick ride home, and we fell into bed, once again exhausted but happy after a long day of adventures.

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All text and photographs copyright © 1999 Sam A. Mahmoud and Sharilyn Horne.