London, etc. and Paris, 15: A River Cruise and a Visit to the Arc de Triomphe, but no sign of Xi Jinping.

Travel Date: Monday, May 6, 2024

We descended the stairs at the end of the Rue de la Manutention (which sounds a little better in French than it does in English, but not much. The English translation of “Manutention” is “Handling”), and made our way to the footbridge across the Seine that would take us to our river tour.

The river cruise in Paris starts just below the Eiffel Tower. I will spare you the ten or twenty photos I added that day to my already ridiculously large collection of Tower photos, but there are many pix of that landmark on my last post, if you have a hankering.

There is a very large island in the Seine east of the Musée D’Orsay called “Île de la Cité.” Just east of that is another, smaller island that fits nicely against the first (just as though it all used to be one big island!) called Île Saint-Louis. The cruise took us around that second island and then headed back toward its home dock.

Here are some of the sights we saw on the trip.

One of the highlights of the cruise was a close-up of Notre-Dame de Paris, which suffered a disastrous fire on April 15, 2019. The meticulous and very expensive reconstruction of the mediaeval Catholic cathedral, and particularly its spire, continues. It is expected to reopen in December of 2024.

There was a large group of high school students on board with us, and they insisted on making a howling noise whenever we went under one of Paris’s many bridges, thereby allowing us the opportunity (as it were) to hear not only them, but also their echoes.

Kids!

After the tour, we took the Métro to the Arc de Triomphe (1806) which is located at the west end of the Champs-Élysées. (Beyond that, the road is called l’Avenue de la Grande Armée.) We had seen the east end of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées earlier in the week, when we visited the Place de la Concorde.

We declined to climb to the roof of the Arc de Triomphe and instead satisfied our curiosity from across the immense traffic circle that surrounds the monument.

“The Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, often called simply the Arc de Triomphe [… ] stand[s] […] at the centre of Place Charles de Gaulle, formerly named Place de l’Étoile—the étoile or “star” of the juncture formed by its twelve radiating avenues […]. The Arc de Triomphe honours those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with the names of all French victories and generals inscribed on its inner and outer surfaces. Beneath its vault lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I.” (Thanks as always to Wikipedia, which I support with a donation every month as I’m sure all regular users of that resource do. It’s always wise to double-check references on the site if you are citing the material in Important Documents, and some articles are biassed or incomplete, but in this age of disinformation the checks and balances on Wikipedia make it a very reliable source of background information on just about any topic you can think of. Plus, if you find a mistake, you can fix it yourself.)

I am a fan of the Tour de France, which always ends up circling the Arc de Triomphe during the final stage before heading to the finish line, so I took an extra pleasure in visualizing the peleton zooming around the monument. I would not personally want to cycle over all those cobbled streets, but then there is nothing in the Tour de France that tempts me to participate as anything but a spectator.

Later we walked past the magnificent Église Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, which opened in 1938 on a site the Roman Catholic Church has owned? occupied? since the 11th Century. “The church consists of three parts: a 65-metre high bell tower that dominates the whole and is located on Avenue Marceau, a low church, invisible because it was built like a crypt above which rises the main church with a central bell tower. The building is also characterised by its monumental façade on the avenue. […] It is constructed in the Romano-Byzantine style” (Wikipedia).

We didn’t go inside but the photos on the Wikipedia site suggest that the interior is as magnificent as the exterior.

On our way back to the subway, we found ourselves on a section of roadways near the Pont d’Alma that had been entirely closed off to allow for the safe passage of President Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, who we knew from the news was dining with President Macron that evening. We probably saw the vehicle that carried him past us, but since a lot of very official vehicles with dark windows went by, we weren’t sure which one it was. In the video and photo below you can see Xi supporters on the east side of the bridge awaiting his arrival. I don’t think they saw him, either. One of the people watching with us (of which there were very few. Most people just went on about their business) said that street closures like this for visiting dignitaries are common in Paris. In other words, as we waited for a glimpse of Xi, our status as tourists was probably obvious to all of the locals – and maybe even to the President of China.

We may not have seen the President, but we were rewarded for our wait with a rainbow.