As many of you know I am currently in France, with work of course. I'm sure you're saying the same thing as me....man, NATO life is rough! Yes, I was force to spend the weekend even. But we made the most of it and managed to spend some quality time in Paris....YES, Paris. I bought Rick Steve's Paris tourguide before we left and it was a lifesaver, plus I saw quite a few more floating around while we were there and made instant friends. We left Friday morning and got there around noon. After lunch at a Bistro down the street from our hotel we got a quick metro intro and were on our way to Notre Dame.
While on the island we also saw the
Deportation museum, honoring the French who were deported during the Holocaust, not to be confused with the Holocaust museum that we saw on Sunday. We also hiked to the top of Notre Dame and got some shots of the most photographed gargoyle in France. We next headed to Champ Elysees, the fanciest Shopping street ever and visited the Arc De Triomph.
At the Arch we got right in and saw the sights from on top, I highly recommend paying the money to see the view, it's gorgeous! Every night at 6:30 they symbolically relight the eternal flame underneath. On this particular night there was quite a crowd and we couldn't see what was going on. All of a sudden, to my surprise, I heard the Korean National Anthem being played. It was a Korean contingent helping relight the flame! I couldn't believe it and I finally put my memorization of their anthem to use and sang along. Afterwards Javier and I split from the others and headed over to see the Eiffel tower lit up, while enjoying one of my new favorite foods...crepes. You can get just about anything in your crepe, but the ham, cheese and egg is especially filling.
Day two, Saturday, we started off a bit early to avoid the crowds, although we didn't have long waits anywhere we went. We got to the Eiffel Tower about 9:25 or so and got in a very long line, but then realized a new line had opened and only ended up waiting about 15 minutes. Of course, on our clear beautiful day it started getting foggy once we reached the top so I don't have many good shots. The cool thing that happened though was
after we got back down we looked up and the clouds were being split in half by the tower so there was a streak of blue. All in all we decided we had accomplished one of the must do's of Paris and pressed on to the Orsay museum, which is in an old train station and I'm sure I will be giving that whole scoop to Dad if any of you area really interested.
Next was the Louvre, because no visit to Paris is complete without the Louvre. We were exhausted so we only visited the must sees and about a quarter mile of the nearly 12 miles of art. Luckily, I had been warned in advance about the size of Mona Lisa so no surprise there. Thanks to Rick Steves I got all the background on the painting while were walking and was able to fill the guys in. We stopped at a few other pieces and tried to make out what was going on, but finally gave up and headed out to the gorgeous sunshine and took the Metro to Sacre Coure. I was getting a bit cranky so we stopped for lunch first and did a speed tour inside because there was a wine festival going on and it was sardine packed.
That evening we ended our tour at the Moulin Rouge and headed to the hotel where we collapsed, throbbing feet and all, into our beds and slept hard the whole night. Sunday we headed out a bit later and saw the Bastille monument and after that headed to the Holocaust memorial. It was extremely moving and we spent more time there than any other sight. Also, it had Fort Knox security with metal detectors and X-rays and they had to unlock each door for you before you could enter. To leave you went through one door that had to lock behind you before you could unlock the second door. Both Javier and I were exhausted be we trekked to the Latin Quarter for Chinese food for lunch and then went to the Cluny museum, George wasn't there and I was sad, but we did enjoy the tapestries. We rounded out the trip with a short break in the Luxumbourg park before driving back to Bourges and one more week of work. If you're interested in anymore photos I'm trying to figure out the whole Picasso thing and hope to get them on the web, available for viewing, soon.
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