PARIS January 2nd - 5th

January 2nd - 5th

PARIS

Friday

Left at 3am and headed for the tube, which we realized was closed.  So we luckily got a bus that turned out to be a quicker journey to St. Pancras International to catch the Eurostar to Paris (Gare du Nord).  When we got there we had to pick up our tickets, go through bag scanning and get our passports stamped.  I grabbed a couple chocolate croissants and apple juice for us, then we boarded the train at 5:25am (yikes).  What was I thinking?  

We got settled onto the train.  I updated my resume to send to the head of the program at Laban, then we napped for the rest of the ride.  We arrived in Paris at 9:15am and to our surprise it was covered in a dusting of snow.  We soon realized how cold it really was before we even got off the train!  Teeth chattering we made our way to the Metro station to get our Paris Visite passes for 5 jours (days).  I wasn’t even there for five minutes and I was already frustrated by my absolute and complete lack of comprehension regarding the French language.  

  

At the bus stop at 3:30am!  Made it to St. Pancras in time!

  

At the train station...boarding at 5:25am!

  

Um...snow?!

  

Freezing.

  

Un petit table (it then folds out to un grand table).  We made it but we're freezing!

    

We got on the Metro and headed to our hotel to drop off the suitcase.

  

For Adrianne.

I was really happy with the location of the hotel; we were about 3 kilometers from the Eiffel Tower and less than two minute walking distance from the Metro station Vaugirard.  We tried to find a bus that would take us to the Saceur Coeur (which due to my lack of ability in pronouncing all things French I referred to as “the church on the hill”).  I chose this as our first place to go because it’s the highest point in all of Paris and you can see the entire city.  We got a little lost (my fault) because I chose to walk in the opposite direction of where the bus was.  But it was fine, because we figured it out.  We finally got to it and decided to grab a bite to eat first.  We had delicious (however expensive) pizza from a place called Bella Italia.  We wanted to share a small pizza but they wouldn’t let us.  So we dished out the money for the pizzas (amazing four cheese pizzas with camembert, bleu, mozzarella and something else) and shared a Coke (also crazily expensive).  Took a picture of the bottle for Jen.  All they serve Coke in here is glass...they serve everything in glass.  We realized that you have to climb a lot of stairs (it’s on a bloody hill for crying out loud) so we trekked up the stairs and got a great view of the city.  There was a guy on the steps in front of the church playing guitar and singing.  He played Let It Be, La Bamba, No Woman No Cry and everyone was singing along.  We went inside the church and I snuck a picture (what’s new) then we sat on the stairs for a while taking it in.  The sun was really warm and Tim was feeling inspired so he started writing in the little Moleskine Paris book I got him.  

  

Cobblestone streets of Paris!  Coke bottle for Jen!

  

"Church on the hill"

  

The view.  Tim and I on the steps in front of the church.

  

Inside the church.  Then we bathed in the sunlight while Tim wrote and I took pictures.

The pensive writer...moments before Tim's fear of and hate for pigeons begins...

I took a picture of the light lamp for Adrianne (there are a few to come) and then when I came back I was sitting there next to Tim for a moment and then we made a sound.  I looked over.  “I just got shit on.”  Tim had bird shit all over hat, sleeve and best of all - face.  I laughed hysterically for a few moments, wish I’d taken a picture, but felt so bad I cleaned him up and we decided to head back.  We saw a sign for Espace Salvador Dali so we walked a bit and came to what I imagined Paris to look like.  Small, narrow cobblestone streets, people making crepes, artists in the center of this one area, sunlight hitting the buildings, motorbikes.  It was gorgeous.  Tim and I stopped into the Dali shop and laughed at the book of mustaches.  

  

  

Artsy pics?  The last pic is of the culprits who pooped on Tim's face!

  

Artists - Place de Dali or something like that.  Typical French artist - beret and all!

  

Dali!

  

Streets of Paris in the morning!  Gorgeous!

  

On the way back to the Metro.  Even their graffiti is pretty!

Even after all that, when I could control my laughter to a minimum about Tim's face getting shat on, we got back on the Metro and headed home.  We got into our room on the 5th floor - to find that this is our view:

  

Our room - and the VIEW!!!

From our window!!

We were exhausted and wanted to take a little nap, but I accidentally set my alarm wrong so we took a 5 hour nap.  When we got up we decided to go to the Eiffel Tower because it looked amazing and had dancing lights (see videos).  We took some silly pictures and almost simultaneously both of our cameras died.  

  

There it is!

  

Underneath it, walking to the other side to take funny pics.

Underneath the Eiffel Tower...

  

We're silly :)

We got on the tube and thought we’d explore at random.  Tim asked me to pick a stop to get off at - I chose Madeleine.  We found a little sandwich shop to grab something to eat at and then headed to Bastille.  I got a hot chocolate.  Tim and I walked down the river (freezing) and crossed a bridge and got back on the metro.  When we got home we ate cookies and watched French TV.  

Saturday

I set the alarm wrong again but we got out of the hotel by noon.  We took another trip to the Eiffel Tower to pick up our bus tour.  

  

Good morning Eiffel Tower!

  

  

  

Our first stop was the Lourve!  I had no IDEA how extensive it was.  We spent about an hour dragging ourselves through French paintings from the 16th century.  Then we fought the crazies to see the Mona Lisa and Picasso.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures of Picasso though, unfortunately.  

  

Walking in...and then using the self-timer to take another great picture!

  

Pretty....

  

Finally inside and warming up...

  

The Lourve.

Probably my favorite sculpture.  Reminds me of Angels in America.

  

The masses trying to get a pic of this lady...It's actually really small and behind a wall of glass.  I was surprised and actually kind of unimpressed...

  

The ceiling of the Picasso room.  They couldn't yell at me for taking pictures of things other than Picasso, right?  The other pic is Tim in front of The Coronation of Napoleon.  This I was really impressed by.

Leaving the Lourve, back to the bus!

We got back on the bus and went to Notre Dame.  By this time we were really hungry so we ate at a cafe called Le Quasimodo, haha.  We had a little fight because Tim tried to get me to order in English and I really didn’t want to.  I am ashamed because I don’t know any French and I don’t want to be that dumb American who doesn’t seem to know any other language other than English...it just really bugs me.  (I do know a fair amount of Spanish though, so it's not really that bad.)

We went into Notre Dame and walked around.  We sat down and started watching a presentation on the messenger angels and the birth of Jesus.  I was feeling really anxious so I was glad to be sitting down and relaxing.  We were seeing a lot and it was only like 3pm.  

  

Notre Dame.  Birds.

  

Notre Dame.  Quasimodo.

Probably my favorite light fixture I found for Adrianne.

  

Notre Dame outside and inside.

  

  

Inside.

Back on the bus.

Then we got back on the bus and headed towards Arc Triomphe, which was my favorite place we went to all day.  We got to stand on this little island in the middle of the road and take pictures of the Arc.  Then we walked down and went inside.  I didn’t know there was an observation deck on top of it.  

  

On our way to the Arc.

The trees had these lights on them that made look like they were melting.  Really lovely effect.  Clearly I was enthralled enough to take a video!

  

Standing in the middle of the road on a little tiny island!  Then waking under the Arc to go to observation deck.

  

284 steps later...we made it to where the little circle is in the picture to the right.

  

The view...all roads apparently lead to the Arc...

  

The view.  Turn the volume down.  It's really windy up there.

  

Leaving the Arc.  Getting crepes!

  

All of our pictures by ourselves are in doubles, haha.  One for each!

Then both of us!

  

The moon and the river...moon river wider than a mile, I'm crossing you with style someday?

  

Another double :)

EXCITEMENT!  It's dancing - and as you can see below - so are we!

View of River Seine from Eiffel Tower.

Dancing with the Tower!  I put dance music with it too for effect...haha...

  

On the way down...

These crosswalk signs are SO French.  The little man has his hands on his hips like he's so impatient and angry.  Haha...

Sunday

We got up, showered, the usual and went to the lobby to meet Tim's friend Delphine who'd studied abroad (at University of Tennessee Martin) last year.  She's originally from France, so she and Tim had corresponded about meeting up while we were in Paris.  She took the train in and met us a little after noon.  We headed to Montmarte to go to a cafe that a woman on my course told me we should go to.  It was expensive, but this was the only pricey meal we ate while we were there.  Then we went to the Musee de Orangerie which had a beautiful Monet water lilly exhibition.  Apparently the museums are free on Sundays - wish we'd known that before hand!  We had to wait in line for a long time.  

  

Brasserie Lipp.  Tim and Delphine :)

  

Checking out Monet - thinking of Jen!

  

I wish these pictures did it justice...

  

Two oval full rooms of this...

Me and Monet :)

Almost a full 360 of the first Monet room.  There's a mean French lady who is "shh"ing people.  Haha...

This one is the other room.  You see Tim posing for a pic taken by Delphine...and then you see lots of old people trying to duck out of the shot.  Very funny.  

Being silly...

  

Musee de Orangerie = success!

Rodin statue outside of the museum.

I also managed to get Jen the best present EVER.  I wish I could tell you but she's going to read this.  So you'll have to wait another 6 months...haha.  It's probably the best present I could ever find for her - let's just say that much!

From there we agreed that we were dying to see some MODERN art.  Although impressionism can be beautiful, we'd seen a great deal of non-contemporary art and similarly to when we saw the art at the Tate Britain we needed to counter it with the Warhol exhibit.

Delphine knew a great museum of modern art - THE museum of modern art...so we hopped on the metro (almost said tube) to The Musee National d'art Moderne.  

  

  

Fun interactive art in the Modern art museum!

  

Now THIS is what I call MODERN.  I loved the vertebrae (yes anatomy!)....

  

Trees that I wanted to take home.  Tim said they probably wouldn't be in the gift shop.  The pose Tim is doing is an inside joke that translates to, "Um...quoi?"  And yes, that's a large, shiny red rhino.

I liked this one on the left because they look like dancers.  Also, this may be my favorite Rothko (pic on the right).

Then we left and Tim got some sinus meds at le pharmacie.  We headed to a cafe to find some cheap eats and ended up getting crepes again!  Yesss!  When it was 8pm, Delphine had to get back on the train and meet up with her friend.  

  

  

Metro.  Concorde has the rights of man tiled all over it.  Pic on the right is of the really long human conveyor belt.

Last picture with Delphine!

This Chinese homeless man was playing a shamisen and the guy on our side of the tracks threw him some coins.  I thought it was a nice moment.

  

Back in the room, warming up.  Snapping a pic of the tower doing its dance!  Then realized that my reflection looked kinda cool.  I try to be artsy with some photos...most fail like this one...haha...

Then we decided to dance too!!  I love this video it makes me smile :)

We got bundled up after jumping on the bed and went back to the Eiffel Tower to take funny pics.  And it goes a little somethin' like this:

  

I'm like Mary Poppins!

  

Giving it a kiss!  Tim leaning.

  

Tim wearing it as a hat.  And - WOW!

This is my absolute favorite video, despite it being dark (you can kind of see us dancing in the beginning) because when I added the French music (from the Amelie soundtrack) the quality went down.  Also, the box is really little.

It was still kind of early so we decided to explore a bit more.  We got on the metro and headed towards where the mini statue of liberty...the actual name is slipping my mind at the moment.  Ah well, here are some pics from the waterfront.  

  

Walking across the bridge...and I tried to catch Tim being the angry French cross walk man too...haha.

  

We found it...and it's SO small.

  

There she is.  We were REALLY close to the water...it was quite pretty at night.

We got home, freezing.  It was a very cold holiday, but most definitely worth it!

Monday

Tim really wanted to see Samuel Beckett's grave, so that's what we planned to do in the morning.  When we got out of bed Tim said something like, "It seems cloudy out."

  

SNOW.  

R.I.P. Beckett...

  

We went back to Vaugirard, had breakfast at a small cafe near us and went back to the hotel.  We had to check out by noon and our lunch reservations (we got it as a package with Eurostar) at the Music Hall Restaurant said we need to come between 12pm and 3pm.  This was okay because we could walk around, but I didn't book our train home until 6:45pm!  Whoops.  It was fine though because the hotel let us keep our bags there until after we ate.  It was snowing fairly heavily so we were pretty wet and cold when we arrived to the Music Hall restaurant.  It was a neat place to eat and the food was good.  Dessert (obviously) was the best part!

  

Snow!

  

Sweet dessert...with pop rocks!

Then we got on the Metro, took a long ride back to the hotel to pick up our stuff and made it back to Gare du Nord in time to catch our train home.  

This post took me days to do because there are so many pictures.  Classes start up again tomorrow, so I'm going to post the last few days of Tim's visit tomorrow night if I feel up to it.  Hope you enjoyed a little peek into our Paris vacation!