The First of May - La Fête du Muguet

National Holiday - nothing to do

The next day - it was still raining - it was the first of May. As in many other countries that's a national holiday celebrating the Day of Labour in France. I had already looked up before if there were any limitations concerning that day and actually it was one of the most serious holidays there. Almost everything was closed, even some museums etc. But as the metro was still working as usual and we had 3 other days to go shopping it was okay.

We stood up (too early as always), got ready for breakfast, walked down to the buffet and started the day relaxed. Because it was still not a nice "let's-walk-around-weather" for a city trip we didn't hurry to get started and leave the hotel. But, of course, we also didn't want to sit around the whole day, so finally we left the breakfast room and got back to the hotel room in order to get our rain things and our bags.

La Defense

We left the hotel in direction of the metro station - the metro had become our indispensable possibility of transport with those weather conditions and I was already freezing. During breakfast we had decided to go to La Defense, the large business area a bit outside the city centre. It was a lot of time spent in the metro (about 25 minutes) and as it was just about visiting the place itself there was nothing that had to be opened etc.

So, after almost half an hour metro we arrived in the large metro & train station hall at La Defense. I had been there one time before, but it was with a school class and I didn't remember everything. One of the things I couldn't remember was how to find the exit and so we spent our first 15 minutes looking for the right exit. Finally, we left the train station and found ourselves directly in front of the Grande Arche. We took some pictures and walked around to explore the district a bit more. Actually, the tourist part of La Defense isn't that big. There is a large shopping centre (which was closed that day of course), there is the train station and there are a lot of business buildings around. If you walk up the steps of the Grande Arche and turn around you can see until the Arc de Triomphe - modern and new meeting old and traditional. It's really an impressing view from there, almost as impressing as from the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

Montmartre

After having explored the nice views and some great picture motives and having taken some selfies (it also had stopped raining for some minutes! ), it was almost lunchtime, so we decided to get back into the city centre and look for a nice and dry place to eat. Before we could do that, we had to find the entrance and the right way to the metro line into the city centre again, which was almost as difficult as finding the exit before. But we succeeded and so we were sitting 25 minutes in the metro back to Charles de Gaulle.

Of course, it had started to rain again when we arrived. At the exit of the metro station there was a woman selling "Muguets" - lilies of the valley. The people selling them were everywhere because that is something special the French are doing for the first of May. It's supposed to make you lucky if you buy some that day. So, my Mum and me bought some and continued our search for a nice restaurant. We didn't want to spend a lot, so I suggested to get to Montmartre because we wanted to go there anyway and maybe it would be cheaper over there. So, we had to take the Metro again and walk up the mountain to Montmartre and Sacre-Coeur. Because of the bad weather the usually quite impressing view wasn't impressing at all, so we just went into the church quickly because my Mum wanted to see it from inside. After that we continued our way to the "centre" of Montmartre - where you could find all the artists and people selling portraits of you in the small streets around the Sacre-Coeur.

It's a quartier of Paris which has a lot of charm - artists, small cafés and restaurants, cute souvenir shops and not as many tourists as elsewhere. Even my Mum who is not that interested in art was impressed by some pictures and soon we had found a shop with lovely drawings of different places in Paris. We bought some postcards and two large posters and finally continued the search for a restaurant. They were almost all selling kind of the same food, so we just sat down in the one with the friendliest waiter. We were sitting outside with blankets and a heater above us and it was really okay - you could see more than from the inside, and the air was a lot better. I ate mussels and my Mum a salad (as almost always) and after some time we decided to go on and discover Montmartre a bit more.

After some time, it became quite cold with all the rain so we left Montmartre and walked a bit more into the city centre to find a café there. We had a hot chocolate and a coffee and I ate a crêpe. Then, we just walked around the city, watched people, saw interesting places and returned to the hotel finally. There, I had a tea and we watched some TV until we had to go out and find a place to have dinner again. Sometimes not having lunch and dinner included in the hotel can be quite annoying, especially with that bad weather that didn't want to end. But we just went to the round point as the day before, because there were a lot of different restaurants and it was the easiest way to get something to eat. We talked about our plans for the next day and enjoyed the delicious end of the day.

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