Friday, 17 July 2009
Paris is better in the summer
Bonjour!
Well, we are in London again after returning from one of our many adventures, this time in France. We were in Paris from Monday 13 July to Yesterday, 16 July. Overall, it was a good trip, and I can easily say that I enjoy Paris much better in the summer than in the winter, and when we secure a way home before we leave the country. At least we learn from our mistakes.
Anyway, we arrived in Paris in the late afternoon and once we found and checked into our hotel, we did a little exploring around the area. Our hotel was on a man-made narrow canal and it was a very nice location. When we were looking around for food, there were several locals enjoying lovely picnics along the water and, not to pass up a chance for a picnic, we joined the crowd with a few quiches and some wine that we got at a nearby cafe. As we finished our dinner and started heading back to the hotel for the night, the neighborhood began their fireworks celebration for Bastille Day the next day...
Turns out the 14th of July is Bastille Day. What a crazy random happenstance! We actually didn't realize this until a few days before we left, and it was an exciting surprise. There are three things that we were looking forward to: the parade, the Louvre being free, and the fireworks show at the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, we only got to experience the parade. We decided to make our way to the Eiffel Tower and hopefully climb to the top, and on our way we stumbled upon the parade. There was a bit of a hold up somewhere, so there were tanks and army trucks sitting in front of us for a good 15 minutes, and the soldiers seemed to be getting on well enough with the locals around them; it was all smiles, as any parade should be.
Once they got moving again, Tony and I continued our trek to the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, it had closed early that day to start preparing for the show. We would've been disappointed, but really it seems like it would all be more hassle and annoyance than it's worth. The way I see it is that my favorite part of the Parisian skyline is the Eiffel Tower, so if I'm going to see Paris from up high, I would want to be able to see the Tower, not be standing on it. That and the price tag was a bit too big and the gypsies in the area a bit too pushy, so we got our Hippo Picture and left happily. If I were to be totally honest, much of the sightseeing we do nowadays is inspired by wanting more pictures of Hippo in front of exciting places. If you've so far not been introduced to Hippo, you can see his Italy album and his Greek album on Facebook. If he has the time, I might just make him a blog page later...
So after the Eiffel Tower, we set off for the Louvre because it's free on Bastille Day. However, it's also closed on Tuesday. Guess what day it was? That's right. So we once again found ourselves sitting outside the closed Louvre. So we went to the Arc de Triomphe because it was there. Now's a good time to say that eating in Paris is ridiculously expensive. We were hard pressed to find much of anything less than €10 that wasn't a pastry or slice of quiche, and with the exchange rate being what it is, that makes the cost of eating nearly painful.
After all that, we still had some time that we could spend elsewhere so we headed off to the Pere Lachaise cemetery to pay a visit to someone very special in our lives: Oscar Wilde. It's tradition to leave a kiss of appreciation at the grave, and Tony, Hippo, and I all obliged. We then went on to Jim Morrison's grave, mostly because we were in the area. We then headed out because our feet hurt from all the walking!
Speaking of painful, we then had to head back to our hotel to get ready for the Moulin Rouge show we'd booked before arriving. The sad thing is that we booked it before knowing it was Bastille Day, and it was because of that show we missed the fireworks at the Eiffel Tower. The show itself was about 45% Razzle, 50% Dazzle, and 5% talent. It was rather overpriced, but we got a slight discount by booking on Expedia, plus they give you a free bottle of champagne. I think that this is partly to justify the high prices, but mostly so that by drinking half a bottle of the rather potent drink you'll not notice how bad the show is. We, however, were not fooled by this tactic, and were still able to recount, if maybe a little inebriated, the many failings of the show during our metro ride home. To begin with, it was filled with horrible lip synching: lip synching so bad that it might actually give me nightmares. I do wish they had more solo dances, however; not because I thought that they needed to showcase more talent, but because none of the dancers seemed to be able to dance in synch with any other human being to save their lives. Let's just say I'm happy I had the champagne, if only as a way of easing the pain. It was the first show I've attended in a long time that had me constantly looking at my watch in boredom. I guess it doesn't really help that the last live show I saw before this was Les Mis in London last Friday, and it was the theatrical experience of a lifetime. Thus ends our Bastille Day. By the time we got out of the show, we could hear the finale at the Eiffel Tower and headed home.
The next day we went to Versailles, the palace of the kings of France. It was rather... impressive. First off was the interior of the palace including many lavish rooms with incredible ceilings, and then there was the gardens and of course the jaw-dropping Hall of Mirrors.
It was pretty much an entire palace of eye candy and we would definitely return, especially when they turn the fountains on, because they weren't turned on when we were there, which was very disappointing.
After almost a full day at Versailles, we still had time to go to the Louvre, and this time it was finally open! We decided that we would go back for the full day on Thursday, so we got the essentials down in this trip including the Mona Lisa and the other paintings we wanted to see so that we could spend the entire next day in the sculpture rooms.
And that's exactly what we did. They Louvre's collection is entirely impressive, and Tony was walking around like a little kid in a candy store. I manned the camera; he pointed, I shot. It was a good system.
After a nearly full day there, we still had some time before our late flight so we ran to the Rodin Museum, once again mostly so we could get some good Hippo pictures but also to see some of the masterpieces in person. When we got there we found that the area was blocked off. We asked a guard why and he explained as best he could that there was a group called Manifestation that was planning a riot in the area because they were protesting the high price of health care. I don't really know why they were protesting, as France has Universal Health Care, but oh well. We were confused as to why they chose the Rodin Museum as their apparent location of focus, but when we were going around the blockades we discovered that we were also right next to the French equivalent of the Ministry of Health and Safety. Still, only the museum was blocked off, and the protest group for some reason had a bagpipe player. I guess it isn't a proper protest without a bagpipe.
Once done at the museum, we pretty much just headed to the airport and were off. We had a very obnoxious man to deal with at UK customs who seemed to think it was highly suspicious that I was a student here for a year and would then want to come back right after. He gave us the very unwelcomed third degree. We're leaving for Ireland tomorrow afternoon, and after that it's straight to Scotland, so we'll be off for about the next week or more. Honestly, I'm ready to go home again, but that's not much more than a week away, so I think I can make it through these next few days. I feel exhausted now, but I'm sure after a few months in Lynchburg, VA, I'll be dying to get back into the swing of adventure and travel. Until then...
P.S. I hate audio guides. Let me tell you why. Audio guides are a way of supplying your average Joe with useless information of mild interest once he reaches a very important point of interest. That's the start of why I dislike them: they take a very long amount of time and flourish to say very little. The real source of my hatred, however, is that by having something speaking in a person's ear about a particular statue, painting, room decoration, etc creates in them the feeling that they must stand directly in front of the object in order to understand everything that is being said to them. This means that at every point that a non-audio-guide-patron wishes a closer view or unobstructed picture of a well known object, he or she is constantly blocked by the wall that is 6'2" of stupid tourist who's been standing directly in front of the object for the past minute and a half and cannot possibly move out of the way until the full detailed description of said object has stopped playing in his head.
And that is why audio guides are evil.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment