Sunday morning, we packed up and left our shoebox of a hotel room. The sky was clear and blue, so we headed via underground to the Arc de Triomphe. Now the London underground is pretty naff, it is old and there are always delays. The Paris underground is quite amazing, they have tried to create a tube stop within 500 meters of any point in the city, and this results in hundreds of stops. BUT, for some reason it smells like the tube goes through the sewer system, and the walking tunnels smell like urine, it was quite disgusting.

We went to the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday morning, so there wasn’t much in the way of traffic. But you could see the mayhem developing even with such few vehicles. There are 13 roads leading into the round about, the road around the Arc de Triomphe is about 40 meters wide, so about 10 lanes wide, with no markings what so ever. I really think it would be a laugh to see it in full swing at rush hour Monday after work.

Lunchtime, randomly strolling the streets we started to get hungry. We noticed that there were large queues at ever bakery we passed. Then the thought occurred to us ‘we are in France, lets go to a French bakery’. We window-shopped until one of the bakeries queue had died down and dove in and bought our food. We ate inside the bakery and watched the locals. You know how you stereotype French as always having a baguette (bread stick), well they do. These large queues were for one thing, baguettes. Each person came in, ordered a single 90cent baguette and walked out. After lunch walking back down the street we actually noticed that everyone was going somewhere with a baguette in their hand, it was simply amusing. It would be like someone coming to New Zealand and everyone actually did have a sheep in his or her backyard.

Next on the itinerary was the Catacombs. However, open arriving at the Catacombs, we were presented a sign, which stated that they were closed over winter (November – March). Gutted.

So we had an afternoon to kill before our flights back to London, what to do?! Out comes the trusty lonely planet. Top of the list was Moulin Rouge with associated red light district. So we sped across town, looked about, wasn’t much to see on a Sunday afternoon, but you could get the idea. Of note it costs $175 euro to see a show and get a meal at Moulin Rouge. We walked around the streets, found a crowd and followed it. We ended up a hill at the Sacre Coeur Basilica. It is situated in a very arty part of town. When I say arty, I mean there were hundreds of artiest painting, doing drawings, sketches and selling their wares. It was pretty interesting.

We got on our flight and was home by about 10:30pm. A good weekend.