Day 18 of 23--Paris

Tanner and I are back from our long weekend in Paris. First off, thanks go to my very understanding wife, who allowed me to spend our twentieth wedding anniversary in Paris with Tanner instead of with her. I'll make it up to her when we hit #30. (But as I frequently remind her, how much better can I do than actually allowing her to move to Europe?)

So now, the trip. Luckily for us, this wasn't a flight to the United States, so we got to skip all of the extra security hassles and we still got food on the flight even though it's only about a 50-minute trip. (I'm not looking forward to my next trip to States and being body-searched, run through a scanner that digitally removes my clothes, and told to sit without moving for nine hours with my hands visible at all times and not even thinking of going to the bathroom.) I will say that the Paris airport is as crazy as I've heard. We survived and managed to board the correct train to Paris.

I've learned that one of my favorite things to do in European cities is to figure out how to get around the public transportation system. I've had the chance to figure out Helsinki, Vienna, and now Paris. It's a lot of fun. Riding around with people while they go to work or run errands gives you a better sense of a city than sitting on a tour bus or crowding into some place like the Eiffel Tower. So after two train rides, we popped out of the underground system near our hotel and boom, the Eiffel Tower almost smacked us in the face. Our hotel was about a ten-minute walk from the Tower. That was pretty cool.

Things got a little interesting at the hotel. Due to some confusion with hotels.com, we ended up in a room with one double bed rather than a double bed and a twin bed. We were able to get it resolved for the rest of our stay, but I spent the first night getting elbowed by Tanner.

The first full day of our stay was the outdoor day. We started out the day at the Arc de Triomphe. We spent some time at the museum inside and walking around on the top of the Arc. I'm particularly thrilled about how the angle of this picture highlights my double chin.








Here are a couple of shots from the top of the Arc:









As most of you probably know, the Champs-Élysées is a famous street that goes out like a spoke from the Arc. I got a lump in my throat as I viewed the following sight:





By golly, America may have fallen on hard times, and we may all be speaking Chinese before the century is over, but as long as we can put a McDonald's on the Champs-Élysées, I won't lose faith completely.

(Random insert: Here's the Champs-Élysées at night.)





That afternoon, we went to the Notre-Dame cathedral. I could spend days wandering through old churches. Tanner doesn't quite share my passion, but he was game for a while.





That night was Eiffel night. I'm glad we already had tickets, because the lines for tickets were huge. It still took us an hour to get up there even with tickets. We went all the way to the top this time. It was quite cold and windy from up there, but the view was spectacular. I was too cold to get any decent pictures, so you'll just have to use your imaginations.

The next two days were devoted to museums. We first hit the Louvre because it was free that day. (It's free once a month.) We knew it would be seriously crowded, so that first trip was more of a Louvre fly-by in which our purpose was to check things out and get a sense of the place before we came back the next day for our serious visit. We ended up spending a couple of hours looking at sculptures and Italian paintings. We decided to get the Mona Lisa out of the way that day. It's not like we didn't already know what it looked like, but how can you go to the Louvre without checking it out? It was so crowded in front of the Mona Lisa that I had to lift Tanner up so he could see it.





We then went to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, which, as the French words imply, is a science museum. They had an exhibit there in which we could follow the process of doing the forensic analysis of a murder scene. There were different labs where we could learn about fingerprints, odontology, DNA, and stuff like that. There were also lots of other fun science experiments. It was relatively English-friendly, too.

Our last day in Paris was a study in contrasts. We started out again at the Louvre, this time for real. Tanner likes sculptures more than paintings, so we spent more time looking at sculptures, this time from ancient Greece. We saw the second Louvre cliche, the Venus de Milo. We did look at some paintings and kind of bumped into the Mona Lisa again by accident. It was much less crowded, so Tanner got a better look. I think he was expecting it to be bigger. We then spent some time looking at Egyptian artifacts, which I didn't even know were there.





Around mid-afternoon, I gave Tanner three choices: stay at the Louvre for the rest of the day, go visit the famous Sacré-Cœur basilica (which you can see above in one of the shots from the top of the Arc), or visit the National Museum of Modern Art. He chose the modern art. So we went from the rather staid, formal air of the Louvre to the far-out, is-this-thing-really-art? atmosphere of the modern art museum. This being modern art, it didn't take me long to figure out the French-language warning that roughly meant "some exhibits in this room may not be suitable for all viewers." I started pre-screening areas of the museum before I let Tanner see them. Overall, though, it was fun.





And that was that. We got up early this morning and flew home. I think I've gotten a good enough taste of Paris. Now we need to figure out what we're doing for spring break.