June 6th I turned 23, and what better way to celebrate than take a train to Paris? I was particularly lucky, since the 6th - 10th were public holidays in Germany! So that afternoon, I boarded a Thalys high-speed train to Paris from Aachen. Three hours later I was in the City of Light.
My friend
Jonathan Kalafatis met me at the station. Jonathan and I were neighbors in the Donaldson Brown Graduate dorms at Virginia Tech and had a weekly ritual of watching LOST together. Good times!
Jonathan took me first to a small cafe for some fine French beer (very light and nutty). Afterwards we took a small walking tour of the neighborhood, including the magnificent
Basilique du Sacré Coeur. There was a guy on the steps, totally drunk, who was singing "I must stop Vodka!" over and over in French. I felt very much that I was in Paris.
I spent most of the next day at the Louvre (Jonathan had to work). This was such an amazing experience! The Louvre is
HUGE! It's like a maze, but at every dead end and wrong turn you experience priceless artworks from around the world. I particularly loved both the French and Italian galleries, though I'm not sure what I liked better: the Italian paintings or the Italian sculpture. Perhaps my favorite piece was
Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss by
Antonio Canova, but all the paintings from the Italian masters were so vibrant that they seemed to glow. Once, I had been looking at a portrait of a beautiful Italian woman when I glanced over to see a woman in the gallery. My immediate thought was "Is she OK? She looks sick!". At second glance I could see she was healthy and even attractive, but she looked sick compared to the fantastic glow of the portrait's skin.
Napoleon's dining room. Almost big enough for my family!
Everyone's seen this picture before. I found this one in Napoleon's apartments.
Proof-positive that they had Walkmans in the 18th century.
After the Louvre, I bought a map of the city from a small souvenir shop and took a walk up to the
Arc de Triomphe. You can go to the top for 8 Euro, but there was so much fog I didn't bother.
From the Arc, I took a 40min walk along the Seine river to the Cathedral Notre-Dam. This was absolutely amazing, though actually smaller than some of the other cathedrals I've visited (
Aachen,
Berliner Dom, and
St. Paul's felt larger, though
Westminster might have been smaller). There was a mass in progress, and strangely, they didn't throw out the tourists. That was fine by me, because I got to hear some gorgeous music and smell the incense. The robes, stain glass, and ethereal hymns felt very holy and awe-inspiring.
Jonathan comes from Normandy, so that night he introduced me to some good ol' fashioned
Normandy food. Dinner was a massive "salad" of two fried eggs, about 1/2lb of three kinds of ham, lots of goose liver and some goose meat, all piled on about half a cup of romaine lettuce and served in a gigantic wooden bowl with chopped apples and oil for dressing. It was delicious, but quite impossible to finish (Jonathan had his down 15min before I was halfway through). That evening we met one of Jonathan's lovely lady friends (a coworker) at a local travel-themed jazz cafe (lots of antique bikes and suitcases). Jonathan's friend spoke perfect British English and our first conversation went something like this:
Me: Your English is excellent! You have a very nice British accent.
Her: Thank you. I studied in Briton for two years.
Me: That's great!
Her: Yes. You have a very nice American accent.
*pause*
Her: I hate American accents.
A few minutes later she said my accent was tolerable, and we got along very well. We three sat on an indoor balcony over the band, drinking corona and discussing how we would save the world.
The next day was another work day for Jonathan so I was on my own again. I hadn't visited the Eiffel Tower yesterday because of the fog, and today wasn't any better, but it was my last chance. At 8:00 I sent some post cards and set off in the morning gloom for the famous symbol of Paris.
The tower was quite impressive, and it was really funny to see all the fat American, Italian, and German tourists standing in line for hours to use the elevator, while I happily climbed the stairs after a 5 minute wait. On the way up, I met a terrific pair of Germans from Munich (Linda and Mathias) who were celebrating Mathias' 12th birthday. We immediately became good friends and spent the rest of the day together, speaking German the whole day.
After the tower, I went with my new German friends to
Les Invalides, to visit the sarcophagus of Napoleon Bonaparte. While Les Invalides is nice, it's really not prepared for tourists who can't speak French. (Well naturally, the grave sites of American leaders are not prepared for tourists who can't speek English, so what did I expect?) We spent 6 Euro a piece to get in and see the sarcophagus, but couldn't really appreciate any of the exhibits without a translator. Oh well.
The next stop was infinitely better, and definitely my favorite place after the Louvre:
Les Carrières de Paris, The Catacombs of Paris! Here we found enormous piles of human bones in gigantic rows. It was a little like a supermarket for human bones -- aisles and aisles of bones stacked 4-feet high. In many places the skulls were arranged in patterns: hearts, faces, symbols, and geometric patterns. You could get right up in the bones, touch them, pick them up, whatever (as long as you were discrete). I found three skulls which were perfectly tuned for a little drum-beat action. Mathias was very impressed and wanted me to play again, using two leg bones for drum sticks. I deferred to the approaching security guard and declined my encore request.
I put my camera inside one of the skulls to take this picture looking out through the eye sockets.
Chillen' out with the bones.
After the Catacombs, Linda and Mathias headed back to their apartment and I went to borrow a suit from Jonathan, because we were headed to the opera! Unfortunately, my subway car broke down on the way to the show and we missed our chance for last-minute tickets. To salve our disappointment, we went in search of a nice place for dinner and wound up at a small restaurant strategically opposite one of Jonathan's favorite dessert bakeries. I had a lovely three-course meal: goat cheese wrapped in sweet crepes, grilled perch, and chocolate creme and espresso for dessert. Afterward, we bought a "Bombe Chocolate" from the dessert bakery and took it back to Jonathan's place where we watched the season finale for LOST season 3. It was a fantastic evening and a perfect conclusion to my Parisian vacation.
