Sun, Aug 26: Paris, France

Hotel (3 nights):  Hotel Abbatial St Germain.

We took trains to Paris (via Basel):
We left Lucerne at 8:55 am, and arrived in Basel at 9:54 am.  Half of the Basel station is in Switzerland and half is in France.  You could tell where you were by looking at the national flags. 
We then changed trains and left Basel at 10:34 am via a high speed train (TGV), which travels up to 200 mph.  We arrived in Paris at 1:37 pm.

We ate lunch on the train, which was included in the ticket price.  We did not take many photos from the train – moving too fast, lots of trees, bushes, and berms. 

The hotel was in good spot, a long block to view Notre Dame, only a couple more blocks to actually get there. 

And not too many blocks from the Latin Quarter.  We walked to Notre Dame and then to the Latin Quarter, which was very crowded.  The area is the original home of the Sorbonne University and many other schools and gets its name from the fact that during the Middle Ages the international language of learning was Latin.  The Latin Quarter now contains mostly restaurants of all types, plus other food places like bakeries, sprinkled with other kinds of shops.  Cooking in the windows were slabs of meat for gyros and whole pigs.

More photos of Notre Dame and Latin Quarter ...