Catching up

I've been lazy. Time to make up! Since my last pathetic attempt to describe Edinburgh, I've been to Paris. Yes! City of lights! City of baguettes! City of snooty French waiters! Or so we thought.

The lights part probably fits, actually, though we generally had early nights due to walking multitudinous numbers of kms all day and being exhausted as a result. Ditto the baguettes: lots of people (including us) wander the streets of Paris armed with a two or three foot long stick of narrow French bread. TASTY narrow Frnech bread, I might add. I became very fond of Boulangeries in the short three days we were in Paris. not only do they have exquisite bread, but they also have some of the most delightful pastries ever. I tried a chocolate and almond paste concoction that was heavenly. Anyways, two of the Paris myths turned out to be true. The third that I mentioned, however, was demonstrably false. French waiters were great! Friendly, helpful, polite, and patient with our butchered attempts at their language, they were the opposite of all the reports we've heard. We came to the conclusion that it's likely all in your attitude: if you go to Paris expecting service staff to speak flawless English to you immediately and get snarky if they don't, you'll probably be treated accordingly. If you attempt their language and resort to smiling and pointing if it doesn't work, you'll probably get much farther.

Rem, Kirsten, Tom and I arrived in Paris March 15 and departed the 17th. In between, we split up, Kirsten and Tom intending to do more shopping than our budget could consider. We saw most of the tourist highlights, I think: the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysses, Sacre Coeur, Montmartre, Notre Dame, the Pont Neuf, the Seine, the Tuileries gardens, the Obelisk, the Louvre and its amazing grounds, the Arc de Triomphe and that crazy traffic circle, the Latin Quarter... I can't remember what else! We walked and walked and walked and probably covered at least 15 kms of ground in all the wandering we did on the Wednesday alone. Enough walking to make up for all the bread and ice cream and pastries we were eating, at least.

My favourite part was probably, cheesy though it may be, the Eiffel Tower. I was surprised by how pretty 10 tons of steel girders (and that's really all it is!) can be. We actually went twice. I had intended to go up it on Wendesday but changed my mind when I saw a huge tour group massed by the elevators. It suddenly seemed less desirable and the 4-10 euros fee for the elevators (1st floor - 4 euros, 2nd - 7, top - 10) turned me off. We walked around the grounds for a good while, taking many, many [a href="http://www.remkes.ca/Photos/Books/Paris/paris0.html"]pictures[/a] and enjoying the gardens. I was thrilled that the tower was planted amongst gardens and duck ponds and parks and trees: I'd pictures sterile concrete with innumerable tourist vendors. There was concrete and vendors, but it was still much nicer than I'd expected. Anyways, later that day I regretted not going up, so Rem and I returned the next day and ascended to the second level. I'm glad we did: it was quite a view! And it was fun to get kissed on the Eiffel Tower on my 25th birthday. Nice commemoration!

Possibly the biggest disappointment was the Louvre. By now, i've been in enough art museums that I know my enjoyment limit is at most 3 hours, unless it's a style I really like, in a comfortable, quiet environment, etc. Still, I had some expectations that the Louvre would be more magical than it was, so that was one illusion shattered. Oh well. I saw the Mona Lisa, and had to laugh at the massive crowds around it. Tom took a picture of the crowd with nine hundred cameras pointed at the most famous painting ever. I was surprised that it was so small: it was maybe two feet by three feet. I'd expected something at least two or three times that size. We didn't have much patience for the crowds in that section of the museum, so headed to less popular areas. Though I didn't care too much for the Italian paintings, I did like the sculptures I saw - including the Venus de Milo: whoever modeled for those had some really nice muscles. We spent only a few hours in the museum, which was fine with me, but we managed to get lost in our attempt to find an exit. We stumbled across an American couple who were also looking for an exit but had given up all hope and collapsed onto a bench. It's a HUGE museum - housed in a Palace, I guess we should expect that - and even the maps can lead you astray.

I won't give you detailed descriptions of everything else: plenty of writers have beaten me to it and done a better job than I can. It was really fun to finally see the places I've heard described in books and now have an idea where they are in relation to eachother. I'm still having trouble replacing my old imaginary images with the new real ones, though, and I find when I think of a book I read pre-Paris, it's with the same pictures as before, inaccurate though they are.