Sacre Bleu!? No -- Sacre Couer!

Back to Paris -- I'm behind on that by a day and half.  When I last wrote about Paris, we had just finished lunch on the Champs d'Elysee.  So we walked up behind the Arc d'Triomphe, seeing it for what we expected to be the last time.  We caught the Metro to Pigall, at the base of the mont that Sacre Couer is on.  While the neighborhood has improved since the 1980s, it's still a bit on the sketchy side.  Walking up, there were all these cheap souvenir shops, and men playing a con game I'd never seen before. 

Unlike my first unsupervised visit to NYC back in the mid-1970s (a little rougher than now), I was not tempted to get taken in by the sharks.  Back then it was three card monte, and now they use something else in their shill game.  Fortunately, back then my brother Rick let me know it was a scam, so I didn't lose money then either.  But, here below Sacre Couer, the games were going on full steam -- there were probably 20 or so con men offering the game. 

We then took the funicular up to Sacre Couer.  The basilica is much more interesting outside than inside (primarily because it was started in 1875 and finished in 1914).  Not only is it perched on a hill high above Paris, but the design is more Middle-Eastern and decidedly untraditional. 

Taking the Metro from another nearby station, we headed to Cite so we could go to Notre Dame.  After getting discombobulated coming out of the Metro, we eventually found our bearings (we were looking at the Right Bank when we thought we were on the Left Bank!) we went first to Bertie's Cupcakes, just a couple of blocks from Notre Dame.  It's highly recommended on Trip Advisor, and was quite good.  It was just a small place jammed into a tiny storefront, but a well-needed break. 

We then went into Notre Dame -- we never saw the way to go up the towers, so we wandered around one of my favorite places, and I told my favorite bad Notre Dame joke (be sure to ask me to tell you).  2013 is the 850th anniversary of the cathedral, and they had a big area to sit outside and look at the cathedral, which we did until there was a storm in the distance and it started raining.