Today's weather: cold and windy. A perfect day to climb about 400 million stairs.
Our first stop this morning was a breakfast place called Cafe Mareva which is a dedicated gluten-free restaurant.
Most everything was in the shape of waffles but made with potato flour. The place was simple and cozy and the food was delicious. This was our second excellent meal. I think we're starting to see a pattern here.
After breakfast, we headed up the hill to The Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris (Sacré-Coeur Basilica). This is where we realized that Paris has a lot of stairs. And when I say a lot, I'm not talking hundreds, or thousands or even millions. Paris has over a billion stairs which makes sense since the word Paris, translated from the original Norse language, actually means City of Stairs.
Because Dave and I aren't "planners" we ended up walking down all of these stairs after our tour of Sacré-Coeur. We then decided to visit the Salvador Dali museum and it was located - guess where? Just down the road from where we were. At the top of the stairs.
Dave found some more interesting trees and stood among them. It turns out the trees in Frankfurt are more magical than the ones in Paris. Dave can now conjure demons with a snap of his fingers.
We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around and looking in a few shops. I bought some art from one of the local artists in the Montmartre square and Dave bought some more Advil to anticipate climbing more stairs. Did I mention Paris has a lot of stairs? Just checking.
When we got back to our flat, we googled "what time do French people eat dinner" because the night before we had been the only ones in the restaurant and we didn't want to look like silly tourists. We found out that we should go to dinner between 7 and 10 pm. So we made reservations at an Italian place called Scuderia Del Mulino which is near the Moulon Rouge. Once again, the food was delicious. All the restaurants here are very cozy which means there is typically about 10 inches between you and the table next to you. Our table mates to one side were English. So of course Dave struck up a conversation, him being English and all. The other couple was here to see a rugby match so we chatted with them about American football because we don't know anything about rugby.
After dinner it was pouring down rain but we were prepared with one umbrella (mine - Dave left his at the flat) and we took a nice stroll back to the flat without using our GPS. The reason we didn't use the GPS is because both our phones were dead and we didn't bring the portable chargers that we bought specifically for this trip. Fortunately, I have a keen sense of intuitive direction and we made it back to the flat after realizing we had gone around the same block three times and then accidentally turning down the right street.
Available tickets to a show at the Moulin Rouge that night were €220 each. We decided to skip the show and get a souvenir beret instead.
Tomorrow we'll be visiting a bunch of places. I'm pretty sure there's gonna be more stairs.