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Published: August 28th 2005
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Eiffel Tower from Trocadero Palace
The most embarrasing thing you can do when asking a stranger to take a picture is to speak slowly and use hand gestures as if you're expecting them to have a hard time understanding English only to find out that 1) they're American and 2) you feel like a total jerk. The monkey is off my back! I finally got around to taking the big trip...Paris and Rome packed into a single week. Now I can get back to general weekend laziness and sleeping until ungodly hours of the mid-afternoon!
So that I can light up both France and Italy on the little TravelBlog map, and so that both you and I don't get totally bored with an epic blog entry, I'll split the 'Big One' into two entries. Just to preface this whole massive 2-blogger of a vacation, let me first say that the last week was probably the most strenuous 'vacation' I've ever taken. Work seemed like a cake walk this last week...
Saturday: Kat lands at noon in Schipol and we're off to Amsterdam to visit the
Van Gogh museum. Really cool, but the Starry Night is very quietly left out of the picture. Apparently it's in the New York Museum of Modern Art and not in Vincent's home country. Hmmm..and you wonder why people are annoyed by the States. A quick dinner in the Hague and then we're back home and packing for....
Sunday, where we're up bright and early and on the 1st class high-speed
Quasi's Place
Notre Dame means 'Our Lady', which is why the Virgin Mary is featured prominently in the middle of the rose window of the facade. You can thank me for the 5-second history lesson later. Thalys train to Paris. The reason for 1st class is not cuz I'm blinging, but because I plan ahead about as well as any flat-footed, short-legged guy with athletic asthma runs a marathon and 1st class was all that was left, but I digress. As soon as we bumble our way through the Paris metro system, we step out into the sun to see
Notre Dame Cathedral. Sweet, we've arrived. Following a tour through Quasi Moto's old stomping grounds (he's fictional, by the way), we headed off to a little museum called the Louvre. Yeah, they've got some art and stuff there. It's cool. It's also the bigger than David Hasslehoff in Germany, and lemme tell ya, that's big. I've seen mosh pits more friendly than the throng of people pushing down the guard-railed line towards Da Vinci's smiling lady. Shame nobody seemed to bother looking at Mona through anything less than a digital camera screen!
After surviving English-based interaction with a French waiter (I'd say 'snobby French waiter with a thinly-veiled disgust for American tourists', but that would be repetitive) we were out again to see the
Sacre Coeur basillica, high above Paris and dramatically illuminated atop Montmartre hill. The view was
The Louvre
Oooh! Looky! The big glass pyramid of the Louvre, just like in The Da Vinci Code! certainly worth all the stairs it took to see it!
After all this, I was beat. Imagine how Kat felt on her first day of trans-Atlantic jet lag!
Monday: Museum card day. The way this works is you pay 18 euro for an all-you-can-eat museum card and then you power tour to make sure you get your money's worth. We started on the far west end of Paris and worked back towards our hotel in the more south-eastern Latin Quarter. First stop,
Trocadero Palace. We came out of the subway and started wandering with the crowd, not really sure of where we were headed. Turning the first corner we found ourselves smack in the middle of the two curved buildings and looking straight on to the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Out comes the camera for the token tower snaps...
Next stop was the
Arc de Triomphe, which is great an all, but still somewhat hard for me to fully enjoy, since it's really just the center piece of one of those London trip (
Circles of Hell and Robin Hood) headaches; a roundabout. At least the French drive around it in the right direction. Afterwards, a failed attempt at the closed-on-Monday Rodin museum led
Mona Mob
Apparently, everybody tourist in the Louvre has to take a good picture back home, and this is what such a spectacle looks like. us to
The Invalides, home Napoleon's tomb. After an informative audio tour, in which my main point of learning was about a type of marble used for the tomb called porphyry that's so rare it was only used for imperial purposes (and can no longer be found, apparently), we were off to walk through the courtyard of the
Hotel De Ville on the way to see some modern art at the
Georges Pompidou center. Here we got to see works by Picasso, Matisse, Andy Warhol, and Dali, as well as the ever-controversial modern styles such as monochromism. Kat was less than impressed by the solid color canvases, although the performance art video showing a bird's-eye view of a guy painting an entirely white room red did draw quite an audience.
At this point, Kat's jet lag got the better of her, so while she napped, I waited in line for over an hour to ascend the steps of the Towers of Notre Dame. At least I met up with some cool Michigan coeds to pass the time, but the view from the top, closeups of the famous gargoyles, and a peek at the flying buttresses of the cathedral would've been worth the wait anyways.
That night, we went back out to see the Eiffel tower lit up and to watch the 10 o'clock twinkling of lights. After a Parisian dinner near the tower and a bottle of wine, we were back to the hotel and out like a light.
Tuesday Being absolutely spent from the day before, we slept in until the last possible minute to checkout. When we did make it into the sun, we visited the
Bastille monument before having crepes on the Champs Elysees on the way to the beautiful fountains of the
Place de la Concorde. After a wander in the super-swanky shops of the Champs Elysees, we took in the ridiculously opulent
Opera house and the
Pantheon before hopping back on the Thalys.
So BAM, there you have it. Paris in 2.5 days. We got in at about 10:30 on Tuesday, which gave us just enough time to unpack, pack, and then take a quick 5 hour nap before our flight to Roma (
Friends, Romans, Countrymen...).
PARIS PICTURES
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