I'm French......

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....that's why I have zis OUTRAGEOUS accent!

And so to Paris. I'm going to be quite upfront here (unusual for me right?) and say straight out that I didn't like Paris. I know lots of people do but for a city with so much to offer, Paris left me strangely cold. Now I can't be wholly negative because I've managed to see and do some things that I've always wanted to - da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks at the Louvre, van Gogh's self portrait in the Orsay, the tombs of Napoleon and Marechal Foch, the Arch de la Defense. I've drunk the wine, eaten the cheese and pastry (and the croque monsiuer. Ah, the French version of the ham and cheese toastie!) and yet somehow I'm leaving Paris behind feeling unfulfilled. Jen, on the other hand, enjoyed the city immensely so don't just take my word for it, she'll give you a second, much more favourable opinion.

I've not been able to quite place what it is about Paris that has left me less than enchanted. Some of it I will certainly put down to the weather (it seemed to rain consistently at the wrong time). It might have been cold in Germany, but at least it was mostly dry. It was wet there much of the time we were visiting. The rest, I just don't know. It doesn't seem to have the historical and cultural gravitas of Rome (despite the fact that it should) and it lacks the sense of progress and the overcoming of adversity that one gets from Berlin. Maybe I'm being unfair. Perhaps I'll stop the hard to justify judgements and just tell you what we did eh? Yeah, lets do that. But one thing first - Top Travel Tip for Paris: It's really expensive. Really. If you're on a budget that's as tight as ours make sure you get self-catering accommodation. If you're not on as tight a budget as us, choose your eateries carefully!

We rolled into town late afternoon in pouring rain at Orly Airport. Not a great first impression of the city as we sat on a crowded train all the way to Gare du Nord. Well, it wasn't so much the train as the bloke with the accordion. Yep. First thing in France after an early start and a flight with no breakfast was a dude with an accordion. His bossa-nova rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” didn't go down that well. When we got to the Gare du Nord we met a strange Frenchman who thought we should ride all the way to Gare Saint Lazare before changing subway lines to come back to the hostel. Bizarrely, it's only one two stops from Gare du Nord making just as many changes. He was weird so we decided to walk and he wandered off in a huff. I tell you, after two weeks in Egypt, one is so jaded that even people being helpful get the cold shoulder. And I remembered reading something in a Lonely Planet about Parisians being far too busy and French to care about a couple of backpackers in the train station. Probably true.

So after a short trek to the hostel in the drizzle and a quiet wait in the hostel lobby for them to open our room at 4 (well, we dried out too!) we wandered out for some dinner and a look at Sacre Coeur by night. It's really rather beautiful and it was a really nice way to end what was otherwise a fairly poor day. Here's another one of Al's Top Travel Tips, relating almost entirely to Sacre Coeur. There are three ways to get up to the church - the park, funicular and the steps beside the funicular. All of these are staked out by a bunch of blokes I've nicknamed the “Bracelet Brigade!” They've warranted a mention in reviews for our hostel on a couple of pages. If a dodgy looking African bloke asks you to hold out a finger then jam your hands firmly in your pockets and tell him politely to sod off otherwise you'll find yourself the owner of a friendship bracelet that will cost you a “small donation.” We met a nice Aussie bloke in our room who got caught and they'd asked him for 15 Euros! His most excellent response is the second half of this Top Tip - “Here's 2 Euros. Thats it.” and walk away. We didn't see these guys anywhere else in Paris and only at night. Tim saw them during the day when they are at their worst. He even saw one of them steal a guy's camera when he wouldn't play ball. Having said that, the view at night from Sacre Coeur is amazing and the church itself is probably the best thing we've seen lit up anywhere, so brave the Bracelet Brigade and check it out.

Our first full day in Paris involved a great deal of walking, as they always seem to do. We wandered down into the city centre to the the tourist office (which is in Pyramides, in the middle of nowhere. Make sure you have a map before you try and find it!) and decided that if we could manage more than three museums a day for the next week we'd buy a Paris Pass (so no then!) and then headed back towards the centre of the city to the Jardins Tuileries and the Louvre. The Louvre Pyramids are amazing (I.M. Pei is probably an even bigger genius than Norman Foster) and somehow they look just like they belong in the Louvre courtyard. It's great. We wandered up through the gardens and wished it would have been greener, but they are still rather pretty. There's some fabulous statuary and the view, aside from the Ferris Wheel in Place de la Concorde is really pretty cool. With the Louvre behind, the Seine on one side and some of the nobbier buildings in Paris on the other, it's a pretty nice place to be.

Place de la Concorde is really just a big roundabout with a big ugly Ferris Wheel in it that does a lovely job f blocking one's view from the Louvre all the way to the Arc de Triomph. It's worth stopping to check out the Obelisk (we've now seen all the ones that the Europeans flogged from the temple at Karnak!) before you head off up the Champs Elysees. The great avenue of Paris is worthy of a visit to wander that most famous of routes seen by conquerors over the last umpteen hundred years. Strolling along under the trees with the rest of the tourists and admiring the views of the Seine, some of Paris's lovelier old buildings and the odd really nice car was pretty cool. Go during the day though as the French media have started claiming that it descends into a wretched hive of scum and villainy (if I may quote Alec Guiness) at night. They were quite up in arms about this emblem of France being cheapened by drunk tourists, nightclubs, prostitutes and drug dealers. The first half is mostly just parkland but it's worth stopping and looking in the windows of some of the really expensive shops at the top end.

Before you know it, you'll be standing at the Arc de Triomph. This is one monumental piece of sculpture and now you can sneak out to the roundabout by subway, rather than braving the 7 lanes of traffic, it's even better. It might have been a megalomaniac's dream to have such a thing built but it's a magnificent construction. I'd build one if I'd conquered most of Western Europe too. The statues on the outside are amazing and the lists of glorious French victories on the inside are also worth a look - there are more of them than you'd think.....the French memorial to the Unknown Soldier is here (and yoof wouldn't dare vandalise it, unlike somewhere else I know) and a fabulous little plaque commemorating the words of Charles de Gaulle from London to the French people. I can't remember what it says (I'm not even sure if I translated it correctly!) but I liked it.

Al's next Top Travel Tip for Paris - if you're at the Arc de Triomph and you see the Arch de la Defence down the far end of l'Avenue de la Grande Armee and think you might like to visit it then do. Whatever you do though, don't walk. It doesn't look that far away, I reckon it looks as far as the Arc de Triomph looks from the Place de la Concorde. It's not. The Arch de la Defence is a lot bigger and a lot further away - about 10km all told. It's an interesting walk, since one finally gets away from the Paris aimed at foreigners and we finally found some affordable eateries with some interesting fusion cuisine as well as some cool architecture. Neuilly-sur-Seine, where Defence actually is (the City of Paris is a lot like the City of London - it's actually very small!), had more of the sort of Cuba-Street-Bohemian feel that I expected in Paris. So the Arch is really quite spectacular and there are some fabulous buildings, the architecture is amazing. There's some interesting public art and open spaces and it's probably it's a good thing it's not in downtown Paris since it would stick out like a sore thumb! It's a great place to just sit and look back at the city.

We had to relent and take the train back, since neither of us could stomach the thought of making that trek again but since the train made a trip past the Eiffel Tower we decided we might as well stop and see the famous Meccano construct. It's a bit odd since you can see it from just about everywhere but there's something pretty wicked about seeing it right up close. I can understand why the Parisians hated it when it was built as it doesn't suit the character of the city at all, but so many vistas would be emptier without it. We declined to go up it, having lovely views of Paris on our doorstep for free at Montmartre and the queue was a bit long to really be bothered standing for that long after our walk. We strolled back through the park past the Ecole Militaire and the Hopital des Invalides to the Ile de la Cite and popped into that most Parisian of places - Notre Dame. Not a hunchback in sight either. It was a real pleasure to wander around the outside and admire the many buttresses and the overwhelming Gothic-ness of the whole thing. It's a really beautiful building and I count it a real pleasure to have seen it. The inside is also fairly spectacular, even though tourists (even faithful ones) outnumber worshippers a couple of hundred to one. It must be insane in the summer. We wandered around the chapels, took in the glass, the altar, the organ and all the other little bits and bobs that make a cathedral unique. In this case the strangest nativity I've seen yet and a little plaque commemorating the fact that the decision to rehabilitate Sainte Jean d'Arc was made in Notre Dame. They condemned her at the time but that's not important. We gave up walking back to Montmartre and caught a late train back to the hostel. We were seriously knackered and I don't think I've slept that long in ages. We decided that night over dinner that whichever of the next two days had good weather would be the day we went to the cemetery.

Turns out that was the next morning. So we climbed aboard the blue line and rode it almost to the end and found ourselves outside Cimitiere Pere Lachaise. Pere Lachaise is famous because Jim Morrison (of The Doors, if you weren't paying attention in Popular Culture of the 70s class) is buried there. He is, without a doubt, one of the least interesting people in the whole place. Sacrilege! cry Doors fans everywhere but there really are better. Pere Lachaise is filled with monumental sepulchres and headstones that make even the most ardent of cemetery architecture fans go a bit spare. Some of it is unique, some hideous and some simply inexplicable. More on that one later. Other notable residents include Frederic Chopin for one, Oscar Wilde and the French version of Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard.

Heloise and Abelard were covered in scaffolding which was something of a pain and Oscar Wilde's “headstone” (if you can call it that!) was merely covered in lipstick. There were a couple of slightly weird looking teenagers sitting across from his headstone and reading the Portrait of Dorian Gray. Not odd, you might think, except they were reading it aloud. It's not like Oscar doesn't know how it ends! Made me chuckle. We also wandered past the slightly eerie crematorium, which is inappropriately decorated with plumes of smoke and through the avenue of memorials to those foreigners who died for the freedom of France. There are a lot of those. I won't make an ugly surrender joke now. Oh wait, was that one? Anyway, we found Mr Morrison eventually and the authorities had obviously had enough of the behaviour of certain overly ardent (and kleptomaniacal) Doors fans and had fenced off James Morrison as well as plastering and painting over all the graffiti that made his resting place interesting so now he's just one of many with a very dull headstone to boot.

The real gem belonged to a bloke by the name of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson who kicked the bucket on the 2nd of July 1837. Our Mr Robertson (no, not that Mr Robertson, this Mr Robertson) was apparently into physics, phantasmagoria (?) and mucking about in aeronautical vehicles of some description. Whether or not that was how he bought it remains to be seen but his memorial is worthy of a mention. On one side we have a lovely image of him flying off in a balloon and being admired by all and sundry but on the other we see many French people, one in a helmet and some in tight pants, cowering as they are assailed by many and varied phantasms led by a flying skeleton with a trumpet (You might need to zoom the photo. You might need to wait till I can show you the big one....) Precisely what is going on here was beyond Jen and I and possibly even beyond the late Etienne-Gaspard, but it's worth stopping for a look at it. Make sure to note the winged skulls gracing the cornices and the forlorn winged head in the centre. As far as I'm concerned it's the highlight of any visit to Pere Lachaise.

After an outstanding meal ordered only in French and paid for only in French (omlettes and chips!) we headed south of the Seine to an old railway station. Did you know that the Musee d'Orsay was an old railway station? I didn't. Surprised? I was. Orsay is the museum that fits between art covered by the Louvre and art covered by the Centre Pompidou so it runs inside a pretty small window of about 1700 to about 1940 (Compared to the Louvre - the Year Dot to the end of the Renaissance and then some) but inside that gallery are some of the most amazing works of art I've seen in a long time.

I could waffle on and on about what I saw in the Orsay. I could spout names of artists and paintings but I won't. I could rabbit endlessly about how great it was without any detail but I won't do that either. Orsay is a must do in Paris and if you pass on it you'll be missing probably the best of the great galleries of Europe. Louvre is too big, the Uffizi is too packed, Orsay has it just right. From the sculptures around the concourse and where the trains used to stop through the top rooms of European Impressionism, the whole place is a delight to visit. Okay, I'll mention a few things. There's a fabulous self portrait by van Gogh, as well as his “bedroom in Arles” painting. There are a couple of enormous Toulouse-Lautrec canvasses (how an alcoholic dwarf managed them I do not know!) and plenty of Monet, Manet and others to keep the eye amused. There are a couple of Rousseaus that I've seen before in Washington, but “War and Famine move across the Countryside” (I think it's called) is a fabulous work. I even saw Whistler's Mother, which was odd given that I'd just finished a Patricia Cornwall book in which she argues that Jack the Ripper was a bloke called Walter Sickert, once a pupil of the great master, James Whistler. Anyway, Orsay was also my first introduction to Gustave Moreau, a favourite of Jens, but there's more on him later and to some fabulous Art Nouveau furniture and fittings. It needs to come back, seriously. It's so....organic and I am rather more fond of it now than I was before visiting Orsay. So that's all I'll say about that. We left when they closed the gallery, having been in there most of the afternoon. That happened a lot you know. I think when you do get into gallery pace, it's hard to stop.

On a the day when France finally decided that the break in the weather was over, it dawned bitterly cold as we rode the metro down to Invalides to visit the museums in what was once the home to wounded and retired French soldiery. Invalides is home to one of the most stunning (albeit odd) chapels in France. One side contains an amazing golden altar, for the King ostensibly, and this is divided from the rest of the church by a glass wall on the other side of which sat the old and wounded soldiers, where the king didn't have to look at them. Charming eh? The dome of the church is a cunning construction with one dome concealed inside another and is decorated on the outer with an awful lot of gold and on the inner with pictures of all the kings of France. It's chief draw though is the mausoleum of Napoleon I, Emperor of France. 5 metres high, a deep red porphyry, Napoleon's final resting place amongst the people of France that he loved so dearly is a fascinating memorial to a bloke who pulled France up by it's bootstraps with his public and engineering works, social legislation and modernisation. He also plunged Europe into some of the bloodiest conflicts it had seen since the end of the 30 Years War and stomped all over the continent beating everyone who got in his way, except the Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington who both put him in his place comprehensively! The memorial describes the man in beautiful bas-relief and huge statues of the virtues he represented. What's odd about the whole place is that all the work to bring Napoleon home from Sardegna and inter him in this amazing tomb was done during the post-Revolutionary reign of Louis-Phillipe during the so-called July Monarchy of 1840. Why a King would want to repatriate the corpse of a man who had twice thrown legitimate French government in the can is beyond me. Why he would put him in such a spectacular tomb is beyond anyone's reasoning. But it's a spectacular place. He shares the chapel with a couple of other noteworthies - his brother, Joseph Napoleon, King of Spain and Naples, and Marechal Foch, the man who led France's military through the Great War. Foch's tomb also serves as something of a memorial to the some 7 million French men under arms who died over the five years of miserable conflict.

The rest of the museum has a fairly detailed coverage of French military history since the early Middle Ages. It's collection of arms and armour is probably the best I've seen and certainly has some beautifully unique pieces, none of which photograph all that well, so you'll have to either take my word for it or go and see them yourselves. The sections on the Great War and World War II were both a bit of a chuckle, neither dwelling at all on the incompetence of French politicians and General Staff in both conflicts. It made little mention of their inability to defend their own nation, especially the second time round when they outnumbered and out gunned the Germans on land, sea and in the air and still couldn't beat them. It did have a great film and photo collection that was well utilised though and made for some interesting viewing, mostly for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it and while it was quite expensive, I think worth the visit. For the non military minded, don't bother (unless you're a huge fan of Napoleon and his work!), but wander past and check out the church dome at the very least. It's hard to miss in the evening sunset.

Now, the Louvre. This was probably the hardest bit of text to write in this blog. The Louvre is certainly the most difficult gallery to describe. It is said (by whom?) that it takes six weeks to see the Louvre properly. At 9 Euros a go, that's the best part of 400 Euros, so I suggest trying to do it in an afternoon. It's open late a couple of nights a week and that's when we went. It's marginally quieter. The Louvre is huge. It covers 7000+ years of art, from pre-dynastic Egypt and Babylon all the way to post-Renaissance France and everything in between. And it's rammed full of art. There's hardly a wall without something on it and since it was once a royal palace, there's hardly a ceiling without some sort of embellishment. It does something to your head and I have to say that the one thing I wanted to do afterward was play computer games and watch trash on TV. Serious mental overload. Al's Top Travel Tip for the Louvre - get a map, check out the collection and work out what things you really want to see and then go see them. Walk straight through galleries if you have to. When you're done and you still feel like more, then go back and look at the map and see the things you think you might like. If you've no idea, then let us know and we can certainly recommend which bits you don't bother with unless you have to. Right now I'll say avoid the sections of Dutch painters doing still life. I've seen more paintings of fruit and dead wildlife since we left New Zealand than I ever care to see again, so long as I live. Equally, if you've visited (or are visiting) Greece, Italy or Egypt, you can largely skip those bits. There are a few things you should make an effort to see, but if it's a case of doing those galleries at the expense of something else, I'd go for something else. We did.

So what's good in the Louvre? Well, it's art, so that's all subjective, but here's my brief list of things I think are worth stopping to look at. There is a good collection of marble statuary, the centrepiece of which is obviously the Venus de Milo. Jen wondered (and I agree) how such a statue could become so famous? There are many like it, many in better shape and many that are far more interesting. But we stopped and checked it out anyway. It's one of those things that it's good to see in person. I was more interested in the two complete “Freed Slaves” by Michelangelo since we saw five unfinished ones in the Galleria dell' Accademia in Florence and I was curious to see how they might have come out. There's an interesting collection of Persian and Babylonian artefacts that made a nice follow on from the material in the Pergamom Museum in Berlin. Particularly good are the Sphinxes from Babylon and the painted tiles of Darius' Immortals from Persepolis. We saw some great medieval art and church sculpture unscrupulously flogged by the museum over the years and some interesting pre- and post- Renaissance religious art, some of which seemed immensely entertaining at the time, quite inappropriately. I'll show you the pics when I get home. We admired a couple of good El Grecos and some brilliant work by Gericault, including Le Radeau de la Meduse, possibly his best work.

The Rubens Room is something that I was told by my parents that I simply must see. Now I figured it was a room full of works by Peter Paul Rubens but it's so much more than that. It's a series of about two dozen works painted by Rubens for the regime during the Regency period and it depicts the marriage of the Regent to the King of Spain and the war that she then fought with her son, the rightful heir to the throne. It's an amazing series of works and a great piece of propaganda to boot. I can't rave about it enough and like Mum and Dad, I insist that you visit it while at the Louvre.

I shall speak of the Renaissance now and the most overrated portrait in history. I like the Mona Lisa, it's an interesting painting, but it's not Leonardo's best work, nor is it the best portrait painted in the Renaissance. (That honour belongs to Raphael as far as I'm concerned!) Why people line up like sheep to stare at an A4 size picture is beyond me when Caravaggio's “Wedding Feast” (which is also a Last Supper) is on the other wall and it's a) huge and b) infinitely more interesting. Leonardo's “Madonna of the Rocks” is in the main Renaissance Gallery, as is Raphael's “Baldassare Castiglione” which are both amazing works that I really like to look at. The Renaissance Gallery is a great one just to wander along one side and turn and wander back. You'll recognise lots of paintings and lots of artists and it's nice to just stop and look closely at the ones you really like. That's what we did. It was one of our last stops in the museum. I think at that point we'd been there about five hours and had been over the best part of the four floors of the museum and were both quite exhausted so we gave in, having missed most of the Objets d'Art, a good chunk of the Egyptian and Greek collections and deliberately skipped the Flemish still life painters. We couldn't handle any more gallery, hence the Top Tip.

We got up early and headed out to the Gare Austerlitz (the French are still going on about winning that. They're like the English and the 2002 World Cup!) and headed for Blois. Now it was a wholly unremarkable train journey (excepting the amazing lack of ATMs in the train station) aside from one thing - running alongside the railway track to Blois was a large concrete thing. It looked almost like a monorail track, without the monorail. It ran for a good hour of train track along the exact same route and then just abruptly ended in the middle of nowhere. We still don't actually know what it was, who put it there and what they might have used it for.

Now Blois. Blois I liked. We arrived a little after lunch and my high school French got me through an entire conversation about where we'd come from, what we were doing, that I probably wasn't related to the McEwen on TV in France (I don't think he was talking about Dad) and why we were visiting. It really is amazing what you remember. We strolled down to the tourist office (aren't these wonderful places?!) and then just around the town for the afternoon. We looked in on the Chateau, at the river and got quite excited by the bottles of local red wine in the supermarket!

The next day dawned fine and we walked down to the far end of Blois where we met a lovely bloke who tested my French to it's absolute limit and who rented bikes to holiday makers and we headed out for the chateau of Chambord. Built by Francois I as a hunting lodge and used by many of his successors for the same, it was eventually to become the resident of various nobles and court personages before finding it's way into state hands in the 1930s. Chambord owes some of it's reputation to the odd fact that it's design may have been done by Leonardo da Vinci. They say may since no one can confirm it, but the chateau's mirror image floorplan and unique double-helix staircase are very much trademarks of the great master (the design for a similar staircase has been seen in his notebooks) and he was invited to France by none other than the builder of Chambord, Francois I. The ride to the chateau was really rather pleasant as we spent a couple of hours just idling through the Loire countryside, stopping in at a little village patisserie for some lunch before we arrived at the spectacular chateau in the early afternoon.

The chateau was being used for filming a Dumas classic for French TV and so while some of it was shut to tourists, it was made up for by the few rooms that were decorated in period style and the odd person wandering around looking very cold in period costume! Woollen hose couldn't keep that creeping cold out in a castle as cold as that. The bottom floor was a display area for a number of tapestries acquired by the French over the past few years to showcase a set lost in the Revolution that had belonged to Francois I. They were a quite impressive, if somewhat romanticized, version of the life of Hannibal Barca. It was quite interesting to see how tapestries like this would have gone some way to insulating a castle like this though, since I have to admit it was so cold. The fires were going but the heat just vanished into the bare stone. Not surprising the Royals only came in the summer eh? Upstairs we explored rooms dedicated to the many residents of Chambord over the years, some restored in the style of the 17th and 18th centuries. They were truly hideous. When did the French become arbiters of international fashion I ask you? We visited the chapel, where the valuables from the Louvre were hidden during the opening months of World War II and a curious gallery of mounted antlers shot by the wife of one of the later residents of the chateau. None of his though. By all accounts she was rather fond of killing wildlife. The other real gem in the chateau was an exhibition of the many things that have used the image of the building as a marketing tool. Now wine, cheese and foie gras I can understand, it is France after all. I might stretch to butter and jam. But when you start trying to sell me the Chambord coffee plunger, matching light fittings, cabinetry and one of the more amazing blunders of the post-war boom, the Ford Chambord, I really do have to wonder. The car was one of the really bizarre things - imagine one of those classic US cars with fins, cone lights, white wall tyres and lots of chrome. Tone it down a little since Europeans aren't into that kind of excess (their words, not mine!) and then expect them to buy it. Not Ford France's best move ever. After all, this is the country that gave the world the Citroen C2.

The ride back was a lot harder, with a consistent headwind the entire way and with sore backsides, cold fingers and not really enough energy we struggled back to the river and made good progress in the lee of the stopbank. It all went a little pear shaped as we arrived at the bridge back into Blois. A storm came in over the hills and dumped about a half inch of icy (almost sleet!) rain on us. Not so good. The following morning we got soaked through taking our bikes back and the weather simply didn't let up all day. We pottered around town for a bit, taking in the outside of the Blois chateau (we skipped the interior as it was expensive and we were both very damp!) and a few of the Christmasy shops around town. One of the real highlights of this miserable day was some excellent food and another fantastic bottle of Loire Valley red wine with dinner. French cuisine may leave something to be desired but the wine is astonishingly good and cheap too. Four Euros was enough to pay for a decent bottle. Not bad.

We got back from Blois about midday and after heading all the way back to Montmartre (without meeting strange men in the train station) we went down into the city and had a bit of a look at the Centre Pompidou and some of the free stuff on the ground floor (the train from Blois and the cost of the Paris hostel pretty well shattered our budget!). It's a pretty impressive structure and doesn't stick out so much in Paris as it's hemmed by much of the surrounding city. We were a mere block away at the Hotel de Ville before we went to Blois and didn't even see it! Much like the Eiffel Tower I can see why Parisians hated it when it was built but it is a unique piece of architecture. Once the sun had gone down we went down to the Galleries Lafayette, one of Paris' most famous department stores to see the food hall and the famous dome. What we didn't expect was that despite the inclement weather, most of Paris was in there doing Christmas shopping. It was like all of Wellington doing their Christmas shopping in Kirkaldies. It's not cheap, that's for certain. Jen even found a sandwich that had truffles in it. Who puts truffle in a sandwich? I don't know. We decided that the food hall is going alongside that at Harrods (not quite as excessive!) and will be visited again when we can afford to buy some of the stuff. The “Wine Library” was amazing and there were too many things that we wanted to buy! We had to flee across to the main building to see the huge atrium with it's ridiculous dome, coloured lights and 3 story Christmas tree! Mad. It made for an entertaining evening though.

So the next day we got up early and headed down to the south west of Paris to the Gare Montparnasse to leap aboard a train to Chartres, to go and see the most Gothic of Gothic churches in the world. Unfortunately SNCF wanted us to pay 52 Euros for the privilege and we weren't too keen on that. A bit of a let down as it was somewhere that I really did want to go. However c'est la vie as they say in France. So instead we contended ourselves with another visit to Notre Dame to try and get some decent photos of the glass (which wasn't so successful) and a return trip to the Galleries Lafayette to get a really good look at the window displays! It was nice to have a really quiet day and I'm not going to waffle about it but suffice to say that we had to actually had to make a movie of one of the displays it was so bizarre. We spent much of the afternoon in the Gustave Moreau museum. Now Moreau is not an artist I was remotely familiar with and in fact the Symbolist movement of which he was a guiding light was also wholly foreign to me. Jen pointed out a couple of his pieces in the Musee d'Orsay and I found them interesting, if not that exciting. That was certainly remedied at the museum in the house where he lived. If you've not seen any Moreau then I am going to have real trouble telling you something about his art. Some of it is similar to Impressionism, some of it looks like van Gogh, some of it is pencil sketches and some of it looks like amateur watercolours. However when these things are combined on a canvas, and they frequently are, the result is astonishing. Moreau had a real passion for painting mythological and Biblical scenes (often embellishing the story a lot!) and some of them are quite incredible. There was a focus at the museum on a painting of which you can see a small portion here. “The Apparition” shows Salome dancing in front of Herod the Great when she is confronted by the floating disembodied head of John the Baptist. The head, which you see here, is sort of in the van Gogh style, heavy with paint, and the rest of the canvas looks almost in watercolour, except that much of the detail is carefully lined in black. This decoration is an odd mix of the Christian, Classical, Buddhist and Meso-American. Herod himself is almost a smudge in the background! I rather liked it! In other works of his, Jesus (or Jupiter or Hercules) looks more like a Thai Buddha than anything else. It's a fantastic museum and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Al's Top Travel Tip for the Moreau Museum - there's a two Euro discount if you show your ticket from the Musee d'Orsay. It's shown in small print somewhere in the Orsay, but not anywhere else!

Finally a day dawned in Paris that wasn't damp, rainy, drizzly or any other synonym for wet. In fact it was crisp, cold and with a beautiful blue sky. After the disappointment of the day before, we were a bit chuffed that we could go to Versailles in the sunshine. Now I've always had this mental picture of an enormous Baroque palace, something akin to Blenheim or Buckingham. Well, I have to admit, Versailles did not match up with my mental picture. It's big, but not half as big as I thought. It's definitely Baroque though and I can see how three Louis'...Louises....Louis's....Louis XIV, XV and XVI spent the wealth of France on it! The first part of the palace, through the Classical Drawing Rooms, (decorated with sort of allegorical pictures of Diana, Mars, Mercury and others) was filled with an exhibit dedicated to the ridiculous silver furniture of royal families of the period. Much of the Louis' collection was melted down to finance wars during their reigns and the pieces that remained were lost during the Revolution, but there were some stunningly hideous works in the collection. Mostly it's the sort of stuff one expects a King to own - hideous, impractical and an exemplar of their gross consumption! But it was an interesting way to see the drawing rooms, that's for sure. The walk through these opened out into the famous Hall of Mirrors - probably the most expensive room at Versailles as when it was built the 300 plus mirrors cost a fortune! It's quite a stunning gallery with the mirrors reflecting all the light coming in from the garden and the view down the main concourse all the way to the smaller palaces of Grand and Petit Trianon. We wandered on through the Queen's apartments and those of the Dauphin and Dauphine before taking a long and leisurely stroll in the gardens where I met a most excellent cat. You can see him here. We wandered in amongst the leafless trees and came across the Petite Haume of Marie-Antoinette. She must have had some imagination (or very selective blindness) if she thought that all peasants lived in such lovely little idylls, with lakes full of fresh trout and cake to be had instead of bread. Yeesh. I imagine that the Palace gardens are simply stunning in the summer. In winter they're interesting, without a doubt, but it really needs the greenery to make it. Jen and I both wondered if when the weather is better if their aren't strange people playing dressups in the palace. It would make things entertaining. Anyway, we headed back into the city only to discover that it started raining again and I have to admit I was well glad to be leaving in the morning for promised sunshine in Portugal and southern Spain.

Yes faithful reader, I know that I said I didn't like Paris at the beginning and I still don't. I also know that I have just enthused over several pages about things that are in Paris. There are things that are in Paris that I loved and will go back and see again. I just don't think that the city made a good first impression on me and never really recovered. I've no doubt that in time I'll look back and wondered what I didn't like about it (I'm already doing that actually...) and somehow I've managed to distance those things in Paris that I enjoyed from the city itself (unlike Rome, Berlin and everywhere else we've been, where I haven't bothered) so if you're in Europe, don't miss Paris on my account. Even if I think the city itself is a bit blah, there's too much there that has to be seen and experienced in person to not visit it, stay in it and try and speak French in it.

Now you may remember the accordion guy I mentioned at the beginning. Bizarrely, there was one on the train to Charles de Gaulle as well. Except he didn't play anything and still expected money. Maybe that was the deal, I don't know. You may also remember that I mentioned that Easyjet in Berlin were really awesome? Well, at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, they bit the big one. We were nearly an hour late leaving Paris and somehow my beanie hat that Jen bought for my last birthday and has served me faithfully through some really crappy weather went walkabout on the plane. I know I had it when I went on and by the time I got off it was gone. A complete mystery to everyone. So not a great flight. On the plus side, there wasn't a cloud in the sky in Lisbon and it was almost warm - 12 whole degrees! It's the small things that matter.

So that was our time in France, abridged just a touch. By the time I've posted this, we'll be in Spain and taking the last few steps on the long walk home. Hope you're all looking forward to Christmas and a good day in Wellington for once. Till next time,

Talk soon,
Al and Jen

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Photos

La Tour
and the Jardins Tuilieries

La Pyramide de Louvre
with some people in the road!

Place de la Concorde
The last Egyptian Obelisk, embellished somewhat...

Champs Elysees
Arc de Triomph in the background.

L´Arc de Triomph
It´s bigger than it looks. A lot.

Arch de la Defence
Compare it with the Champs Elysees photo. You´ll see what I mean...

La Defence
from the steps towards Paris.

La Tour
but up close this time!

Notre Dame
with Christmas Tree!

Hopital des Invalides
Golden dome shining in the sunlight!

Oscar Wilde
Not sure how he would have liked this....

Etienne-Gaspard Robertson
Zoom, if you dare....!

Musee d´Orsay
See, train station.

Napoleon in the Orsay
playing Peekaboo of all things....

Don Quixote
Dali, I think....

Hopital des Invalides
Close up. Lots of gold. Lots.

Napoleon himself
Since there are lots of tombs already....

The Louvre by Night
Pretty....!

Darius´ Immortals
from the Palace at Persepolis.

The Venus de Milo
Why and how this became famous is beyond me....

What people should have been looking at....
in the Mona Lisa room...

The Double Helix Staircase
da Vinci or not da Vinci? That is the question...

The town of Blois
Chateau in the background.

Le Chateau de Chambord
Stunning!

From the Dumas production
but perhaps what it may have looked like.

A Girl's Gallery
Hunting Trophies Galore!

A Porcupine
Well sort of. The royal emblem of Francois I. Odd.

La Centre Georges Pompidou
Pretty? Not really...

The Lighted Dome
at Galleries Lafayette.

The Severed Head of John the Baptist
Moreau at his best.

Sacre Coeur
Like a little French Taj Mahal!

The Hall of Mirrors
I took a photo of the cieling since it's more interesting.

The Gardens at Versailles
with a view towards Les Palaces Trianon and La Ferme de Marie Antoinette

La Ferme
What was she thinking??

Versailles
North Wing, just to give you an idea.

The Gardens of Versailles
from the Hall of Mirrors. Nice!

Me and my cat
Also the last known sighting of my trusty black hat.

Sacre Coeur by night
And damp, but hey. Gorgeous isn´t it!

Comments

[Mal]

Bah Humbug!
Hehe... Al hates on Paris... Thereafter he is going to steal christmas.