Day 216: Easter

4 avril 2010 (Day 216)
Happy Paques! That is Easter…in French. It is almost nine am and everyone is still in bed. Woot. Hyer and Coyle are now currently knocked out on the bed. It is almost seven pm. They have been pretty good troopers since nothing quite worked today. We’ve seen a total of four people fall in the past twenty four hours. Once we headed out the door around 9-10am we went to a boulangerie and got some disappointing almond croissants. We walked around a lot of France is the cold and sometimes rain. One of my favorite stops was probably Notre Dame de Paris. Notre Dame de Paris took over 200 years to build. We went inside and they were having a sermon going on. The little bit that I heard was actually really good and as we were leaving they started playing the organ and this man started singing. I can’t imagine how odd it was for the people who were actually worshipping there to have hundreds of us tourists taking pictures.
We also went into Sainte Chapelle. It is a lot smaller than I thought (10x30 meters). Boy was it gorgeous. It was practically all stained glass windows. Sainte Chapelle was built in 1248 for King Louis XI to house the crown of thorns. It took five years to complete, which is totally insane and the stained glass has over 1,100 scenes.
We went around searching for lunch/a boulangerie which took a really long time. While searching we saw a little (okay big) rollerblading parade. I have no idea what all these people were doing rollerblading, but there were a couple hundred of them. We bought some cheese and meat and found a table and sat down to people watch and have lunch. We actually sat outside of a Starbuck’s. Hyer bought a hot chocolate there (for 4 euros) so that we could sit there…ha! After our lunch we walked over to the Hotel des Invalides and found out that it is not a national museum and that we didn’t want to pay to get in. We went back to the hotel and they took a nap. Once it was late enough for French time we went out to dinner. We pretty much went to the first restaurant that we saw. I ordered a hamburger and fries but I ended up getting a steak hache…that is to say the hamburger without the bun and all the delicious fillings one finds in between those two slices of bread. I was not too happy that I spent 13 euros on a steak hache, but I suppose that is part of the French experience.