Today we awoke unexpectedly late, still recovering from jet lag. Heading out to find a place serving brunch was no problem in the streets of the bustling Latin Quarter, where Parisians sit outside of cafes sipping on espressos and wine, smoking cigarettes, and eating.
We decided to enjoy a meal at the original Cosi, the birthplace of the Cosi sandwich chain. We had eaten there on our last visit to Paris a couple of years back and were looking forward to an outstanding sandwich again. It’s definitely not the typical Cosi chain restaurant you see all over Manhattan. The bread’s larger portioned and the sandwich selection is more varied and about 20 times more scrumptious.
My wife got the salmon sandwich with ricotta, nuts and olive tapenade. I ordered a ham sandwich with ricotta cheese and nuts.
Feeling happy and full, we sat out in a local cafe sipping on espresso and surfing the Internet on our laptop planning our weekend trip to the Loire Valley. After finalizing our plans we wanted to spend the rest of the day biking around Paris before meeting up with a friend for dinner.
It turns out that Paris has a new, unique, and public friendly bike system called Velib—like Zip car but for bikes.
It’s basically a system of bike stations throughout Paris where you can rent bikes via a credit card machine. The cost per day is about 1 euro per hour, but locals told us the first ½ hour is free and most of them keep checking the bike in before ½ hour is up to avoid paying. Quite unfortunately the machine didn’t accept our American credit cards so we were unable to enjoy biking around Paris. Maybe that was a good thing, biking in Paris looks a bit dangerous, especially during rush hours with aggressive Parisian drivers.
So we wandered down into the Paris subway system at the famous Saint Michel square onto the 4 line toward Port de Clignancourt. The Paris subway system is very much like Manhattan’s. It’s a convenient, inexpensive, practical, and quick way to travel around the city, but also very crowded, you can easily get stuffed like a sardine during rush hour just like in Manhattan. But there’s no air-conditioning like they have in New York City subways, so the 10 stops we took to Chateau Rouge left us a bit sweaty.
We were headed toward a Roman-Byzantine church called Basillique du Sacre-Coeur (Basilica of the Sacred Heart) located at one of the highest points in Paris with scenic aerial views of the city. Finding our way through the residential streets in the Montmartre quarter, which we joked as being the east village of Paris, we came upon and the long concrete staircase path to the Church.
Bundles of tourists, in groups packed the surroundings of the grand historic church gazing out into the beautiful view of miles of Paris. Not tall edgy buildings, but cozy, cute, buildings, mostly from centuries ago with thousands of clay chimneys and slate roofs that helped remove all of our New York City stresses and worries.
After we returned to our hotel, I went for a run along the Seine, all the way from the Latin Quarter to the Eiffel Tower. It was past 8 p.m. in the evening, yet the sun was still shining brightly, illuminating Paris in a warm, ethereal glow.
