Friday 30 July to Sunday 1 August 2010
It was really about 4 nights rather than 3 days.
After arriving back in Paris on Thursday evening, we found our hotel and checked in, showered, changed and headed to see the Moulin Rouge. I booked the tickets with some trepidation as I have never been an admirer of showgirl type entertainment, but this was very different to the show I was expecting. There were jugglers, gymnasts and ventriloquists as well as the dancing and singing boys and girls. It is fair to say that we both enjoyed the show.
After a sleep in after a late Thursday night, Friday was spent in the Monte Marte area including a visit to Sacre Coure, where an incredible view of Paris can be had if you venture up the the dome of the church. Unfortunately, as occured when we visited the Eiffel tower in 2008, vertigo played a larger role than I would have liked. We revisited the area where Moulin Rouge is situated to find that the theatre is located in a very seedy part of Paris - strip shows and sex shops are the most common feature in this neighbourhood, along with the ladies of the night.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened over Saturday and Sunday, if you can count a visit to the Eiffel Tower at night, visiting Notre Dame, checking out the Champs Elysees which included probably the best dinner I have ever had the pleasure of eating (including the ubiquitous snails) and viewing the artwork at Musee D'Orsay as being ordinary.
Sunday evening was spent drinking our last bottles of red and white and repacking the cases for our flight to Kuala Lumpar.
A word of warning for anybody contemplating flying from Charles De Gaulle airport. Leave plenty of time for this experience.
The usual security check took a long, long time. There appeared to be two machines for each group of five departure gates. That sounds OK, but not when several of the gates are leaving within minutes of each other, remembering that each aircraft holds more than 200 people each. The real holdup is the French insitance on scanning the boarding pass into the electronic systems before allowing the hand luggage to be x rayed, presumabably because all this information is retained on a database. This meant that each person had to be processed one at a time.
We also had the experience of dealing with a grumpy check-in lady. My suitcase weighed in at just under 15kg, well under the 20kg allowance, but the hand luggage was 2 kg over, so we had to take things from the hand luggage and put it in the suitcase. Given the total weight did not change one iota, it seemed a waste of time. I'm not sure why they bother, except to exercise power......
We are currently in Kuala Lumpar on a shopping expedition, but I'm not sure we have the room in suitcases to bring too much home. Only three days to go....
