Sight seeing with and without aim

The next morning, after breakfast (which is by the way the same every day, so I will be eating the same breakfast for two weeks but at least it's a tasty monotony) I chatted with my Moroccan roommates until the time to leave. The inhabitants have to leave the hostel before 11 a.m. so the staff can clean the rooms. This way I was forced to wander around in the city, again, which isn’t that bad a thing I guess. The hostel gives some incentives to get up relatively early even after a night out and to go outside and enjoy being in the city as long as you’re here.

Today I was wandering around intentionally, too, starting from the underground station Répulique. By the way, this is how the underground wagons look like.

While buying some croissants I realised that in France, just like in Switzerland, you need to be paying a certain amount to be allowed to pay by card while in Hungary you can even pay 10 eurocents' worth of Hungarian forints by card if you don’t mind the amount of paper you have by the end of a day.

I bumped into the Seine and saw the Notre Dame while strolling around. I met a group of girls but I'll write the side story in another article. I walked towards the Notre Dame and looked for a good place to take a magnifique and picturesque selfie.

There was an elder man walking around surrounded by an army of pigeons. It was funny looking at this scene where the pigeons were following the man everywhere. He must have been like a pigeon man. He must have been feeding them of course so the pigeons follow the man everywhere. 

Afterwards I looked for a restroom and quickly found myself in a fast food restaurant. I bought an expresso (as it is written in French) and a strawberry macaron. That was my first French macaron I ate in my life. I've already eaten macaron like things but this was different. It wasn’t that special, though, but hey, it was still tasty.

Meanwhile I remembered I was going to take a guided tour for Science Po students near Moulin Rouge (red mill) and Bastille du Sacré-Coeur. This is not the infamous Bastille you imagine. By the way I live near the metro station called Bastille, which has nothing to do with that Bastille, either.

We met at Moulin rouge and there was an introduction of every participant of the tour. I met a Swiss girl there, too (many other people, too, of course but I sorrily can’t write about everyone). We went to the graveyard of famous people and tried to find people we heard of but we ended up chatting happily so that we couldn't find anyone's grave. When I took the picture we were still very eager to find the grave of a person well-known by the others.

We ran into a statue in a wall which is a referring to a story of a man who could walk through walls. Imagine being able to walk through walls! We took pictures of giving him a high five but we had to jump to reach his hand. I even lifted someone so she can reach the hand. His hand was quite high up.

Here's a close up from Bastille de Sacré-Coeur. I guess that the name can be translated as Sacred Heart Bastion.

And here's the view on (the smog of) Paris from Bastille Sacré-Coeur.

After walking further, there was a black wall full of white scribbling. As we saw the writing on the wall from close up the guide told us that the wall contains the message "I love you" in maaaany languages. French is on top in the speech bubble of the lady. I found English, German and Hungarian. I'm only uploading a low resolution picture. I would have to upload a very high resolution picture to make everything legible.

After the tour we went to a restaurant/bar. I ate cut saussisson (sausage) and French fries.

The waitress put a carafe of water on the table, again. I was wondering that she brought a whole carafe instead of a glass of water for the person who asked for water. But since this story with the carafe already happened before I got suspicious that this action may be common in France so I asked the local participants of the tour about the carafe. It turned out that it is usual in France that they serve a carafe of water after you ordered something. The tour guide told me that it is considered a civilised thing to serve water, most notably during summer. I’m used to ordering everything and then paying for everything I get at a restaurant. But if I consider that there is pepper and salt (and at some places in Hungary paprika ) put onto the table in advance then maybe it isn’t that farfetched to serve water, too.