Post by baj2 on Apr 9, 2017 23:12:55 GMT
What a wonderful quest !
RE: I drew the line at visiting the Parisian sewers ( even if there is actually such a tour
I went to Paris in my youth, mostly to see Notre Dame and the Louvre since they would never come to me.
One of the highlights of my trip was the Sewer Tour. I don't know if they still do the tours but if they do ... worth the trip. I went on the tour inspired by the Phantom underground scenes. The tour starts right at the Opera House !
They are actually drain sewers not sewage sewers and you go in a big boat. It was GREAT. I don't even remember a smell other than "damp".
This tour provided me with one of my more positive encounters with Parisians. I was talking to an older man while waiting fo the tour to start and he was very patiently communicating with me in my probably grade school level high school French. Meanwhile a group of "young adults" were snickering at us and my feeble efforts. He told me to ignore them and we did. I could understand French better than I could speak it. We sat together on the tour. Ah, Memories of world travel !
I love Paris (and France) and have been there a number of times...the last time in Paris was a week before the infamous terror attacks in 2014. Some time ago, we went to see the French version of the Mackintosh production of Les Miserables -- at that time, the only phrase I understood was Valjean's ID number ( 24601 in French
). Unlike in the past when most French people would not or could not speak English ( although in the south, on the Cote d'Azur, people were more open to try to converse in English), there is now more widespread use of the language and some English words have now found their use as part of normal conversations in French, such as "le weekend". The city remains beautiful and gives any visitor a real sense of old world Europe!