All about Paris

(Written at 9:35, 6-24-07, Train to London)

Hey there everybody - Here's another blog entry! So we did paris in about a day - what a rush - we saw like 7 major things in a day and a quarter, and we were pretty psyched about that. We get to do the same thing in a couple of hours when we get to London, so we're jazzed to get going.

We started out by visiting the Louvre Museum with La Pyramide lighting up the entrance of course. We got in at around 3, and before that, simon had read that the louvre is free after 6 to people under 26 - so that worked out really well - we got to go to the louvre for free, and we didn't have to waste any time waiting around for it. We checked into our room for the first night (we had two different hotels for the two nights in paris), and so we headed out to go do our thing. We got a little something to eat first, then went to the Louvre. We saw, of course, the Mona Lisa, which had changed a bit since the last time I saw it - they colored in her face a little bit, made her smile a bit more natural and dyed her hair blond. Hahah, oh I'm such a funny guy - no no, it was the same, but they did change the presentation a bit - before it was behind a giant cube of glass that prevented you from getting close to it because of the glass, but now it's behind a piece of glass 2 inches from it, on it's own separate wall in the museum, and they have 2 levels of viewing. One, if you just want to walk up and see it, you fight your way through the mass of people trying to get a glimpse, and two, you can wait in line for a private 30 seconds 3 feet closer to the painting than everyone else behind you. We decided that it was probably going to look the same whether we got the "ultra special closeup view" so we decided not to wait in the 15 min line for that, but we still got to see her, with her crazy smile. We tried to act a bit like geeky art students - "So, how does this painting make you feel when you look at it? What is the meaning of the coloration on her left nostril? Why do you think he chose to paint her eyes open instead of closed?" Silly stuff like that. (By the way, sorry, no pictures of the painting - the museum staff were on people like white on rice if they even brought their cameras out - i figure you can do a google search and that'll probbaly work out better than some sort of bootleg, "i'll look one way while I take a picture the other way" mona lisa shot.)

After the louvre, we walked through the big park in front of the museum, which we thought was close to the arc de triumph - It looked close enough to walk to, but apparently we were wrong - it was an optical illusion. It was so big, it looked close, but in the time it took us to walk 20 min, we still had another 2 of those lengths to walk until we got to the arc. Better see that the next day. Our hotel was near Montmatre so later that night, we walked up to the top to see Sacre Coeur - fantastic view, with a fantastic church at the top - we couldn't get in because it was later, but it was still beautiful from the outside.

The next day, we started out on our power tour of paris - We first went to Notre Dame Cathedral - well, kinda - they were holding a large service for what we could only assume from what we saw on the big tv screen outside was the ordaining of many new priests. It was kind of an invitation only type thing, where even people that wanted to attend had to sit outside and watch the big tv monitor. But, obviously the outside of the church is nice, although seeing the inside is obviously cool as well.

Then we hit the catacombs - woah - crazyness -they used it as a quarry and then later when the cemeteries got full, they exhumed people and threw their bones in the underground tunnels - a TON of bones, as you'll see from the pictures when I get those up. 1.7 Kilometers of it to be exact - wow.

Then we went to the Eiffel Tower which was fantastic as always. We decided to save a few euro and walk up (which ended up being 700 steps to the second floor, by the way) but I'll tell you - that was a bit scary because it's completely open (well ok, there's a cage around the staircase, but it's still open to the wind) - but once we got up there it was a bit easier on my stomach. We took some great pictures of the surrounding area, and so that was that. Then we headed to the arc de triumph, which is much easier to get to by metro instead of by walking. It was pretty cool, but we didn't go up to the top, seeing as how we had just been on the eiffel tower - didn't need more "views from above."

After that we headed back to our new hotel (we had gotten up that morning and moved our stuff to the new place - if you're wondering why we did that, it was because no hotel nor hostel had availability for more than one day without getting ridiculous on price, so we switched - it wasn't a big deal to do, just letting you know), we found a place to use the internet and sent some emails and such, and went to do laundry, our final (or so we hope) laundry run of the trip. We have done laundry 4 times including yesterday, which makes sense given the amount of time we were gone. It wasn't a big deal having to do it, except for yesterday the machine only took coins and we were both fresh out - so we went scouting for places that would give us change back in coinage instead of bigger bills.

So we got up early and went to the train station that the Eurostar train leaves out of, went through customs for the first time since entering into the european union (crazy brits, checking passports and asking us where we're going), and we are now London-bound. I hope things are going well back at home - I'm pretty excited about the upcoming Independence Day celebration with everyone in town and such. It's been on fantastic trip so far, with a bit more to go, but I am looking forward to going home and seeing everyone.

Thanks for reading - what I set out to write was a quick entry, and it turned into a novel, so forgive me, but thanks for reading this far. See you all soon!

Love,
Matt