Paris: Day Four

I woke up this morning with what is euphemistically known as "traveler's stomach". I must have gotten a bad "jambon et frommage sandwich" somewhere along the way, or maybe it was that entire tube of potato chips I snacked on last night... the salt tasted so good after marching through the hot Louvre all day.  As I waited for the pills we brought along for just such an occasion to take effect, Holly made the daily trip to the patisserie for croissants and orange juice.  By the time she returned, I had recovered and showered, and we ate breakfast before setting off for the RER station.

We caught a train to Notre Dame, where Mass was underway as we arrived.  Not being Catholic, we stuck to the "Visite" entrance, and wandered around the periphery of the cathedral until the priest finished services, at which point we were free to wander in the middle.  Notre Dame is pretty neat, Gothic architecture isn't really my thing, but it's still impressive, and also not sacred enough to prevent the church from making a quick Euro selling trinkets inside it.

After touring the inside, we found the line outside to visit the top of Notre Dame.  Though our pass would get us in for free, we decided that the 20-30 minute queue to hike up the 400+ stairs to the top was more effort than we were interested in investing in yet another view of Paris from above, so we left Notre Dame behind us and turned South to the Latin Quarter.

Let me just say that I love the Latin Quarter, today was our first day there, and if I ever come back to Paris, it's where I'll want to go again.  There are many interesting shops, gardens, people, and landmarks to see, and it's not overtly touristy once you get a few blocks south of the Notre Dame.

While walking through one of the gardens, Holly spotted some teenagers with a McDonald's sack, but I managed to drag her into a pizza & sandwich shop instead.  There was a pretty good crowd of locals in the shop, and no tourists, so I figured it should be good and/or cheap, and i was right on both counts.  Holly had a square of thick-crusted pepper, mushroom, and cheese pizza, and I had a combo deal they had for a square of pepperoni, tomato, red & green pepper thick-crust pizza, plus a dessert (I took a donut) and a can of Pepsi.  Normal price for this can of Pepsi was 2 Euros, the meal with desert and a slice of pizza was around 7 Euros total, I believe.  We split the Pepsi and the donut, but the pizza was too good to share.  It was quite different from American pizza, far less sauce, less fatty cheese, and much better crust.  I don't know why the French can bake so much better than Americans can, but they do.  Holly said that it was the best "native" food she'd had since arriving in France, meaning "other than McDonald's", I believe.

After lunch, we wandered through the Luxembourg Gardens (which are not in Luxembourg), and Holly prevented me from walking on the grass, which I nearly did.  Paris is so densely populated that you can't actually walk on grass anywhere apart from a portion of the Champs du Mars that's far-removed from the Eiffel Tower.  The rest of it is just for decoration, I guess.  Or maybe they don't want the ever-present Parisian dogs to spoil it with their leavings.

I bought an ice cream treat as wel left the gardens, and wandered some more through the Latin Quarter before consulting our map to find the route to the Pantheon. The interior of the Pantheon is pretty impressive, and it was fairly uncrowded.  The most interesting part of the Pantheon, however, is the crypt, where many French heroes are entombed.  We saw the graves of Marie Curie, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Louis Braille, Rousseau, and Alexander Dumas.  Joseph Louis Lagrange is also buried there, and Holly gave me the "You are SUCH a geek!" look as I prattled on about Lagrange points, and why they're cool.

After I finished my impromptu lecture on the mechanics of satellite orbits and proposed homes for space stations, we hiked a few blocks to the Cardinal Lemoine metro station, where we planned a convoluted route to take us to the tropical aquarium on the eastern side of Paris.  It took two transfers, and a little head-scratching, but we emerged at Porte Doree, right next to a McDonald's, which Holly drug me inside after a Coke (2.25 Euros for a large, for those keeping score at home). A large Coke in a McDonald's here is roughly the same as a medium in the US, and they don't have anything larger. I doubt there's a 48 oz. beverage (equivalent) anywhere in the country, as they don't live on the stuff like we do. I wonder what the French think of the Big Gulps at the average 7-Eleven in the US, those 64 oz. cups they sell in the Western US must seem ridiculous.

After chugging our Cokes, we walked a couple blocks east to the tropical aquarium.  This really wasn't high on our to-see list in Paris, but it was included in our museum pass, and I wanted to see if the French fish wore berets (they don't).

The aquarium is in a building that's undergoing heavy construction to become some other type of museum, and it was practically deserted, other than two groups of 4 year olds who were leaving as we arrived.  It's not very big, so don't plan on spending more than 45 minutes here or so if you go, but it was relaxing and a nice change of pace after looking at art for the last two days.

After the aquarium, we made one quick transfer, and then rode almost the entire length of the number 6 metro route to come back to the Bir-Hakeim stop by our hotel, where we've now paused for a brief rest before we try to find something for dinner, and then embark on an evening cruise along the river Seine.

Photos

I took a few minutes to throw some photos in my Flickr account.  These are a few of the ones from my camera, we have many more that'll go up once we're home.

Paris: Day Three

Today was Louvre day.  We knew that it was big, so we set aside an entire day in our schedule to devote to seeing it.  We haven't fully adapted to the time change yet, so we slept a bit late, and I ran down to the Patisserie to get some Croissants for breakfast while Holly got ready to go out.

I got a few croissants from the Patisserie, and a small carton of orange juice from the convenience store next door, and brought them back to our hotel, where we wolfed them down before setting out for the Metro stop.

Seth's Paris Travel Tip #6: Make sure you get yourself a Visite pass for your visit to Paris, it lets you ride the RER trains, the Metro subway, and the bus system all you want for the period of time that your pass covers.  There are different zones that you can cover with your pass, and we chose not to cover all of them, which is why we had to purchase our initial train ticket into Paris, but we've been using our pass ever since.  The pass is a little paper ticket with a magnetic strip that you feed into a machine that uncermoniously spits it back out at you as you go through the turnstile.  It works well enough, but the ergonomics of their turnstiles could use some work, they have installed gates on the back side to thwart turnstile jumpers (like Holly) and you have to shove your way through them after immediately crossing the turnstile and simultaneously retrieving your pass.  You have to also be aware that the spring-loaded gate may be on the rebound from the previous passenger, and you don't want to catch it in the teeth as you're looking to grab your ticket.

One bad thing about our hotel is that it really isn't on the main line of the Metro with any of the other tourist attractions, but, transferring is so easy, this is a very minor concern.  The Metro lines are all numbered, so we just had to transfer from the 6 Line to the 1 Line at the Charles De Gaulle - Etoile station, which is back at the Arc D'Triumphe in the heart of Paris.

The Louvre metro station has an exit that deposits you right into the basement of the museum, where we passed through security and into the area under the big glass pyramid.  This is another place where having that museum pass comes in handy, as there was an extremely long queue at the automated ticket machines, which we completely bypassed as we waved our passes at the ticket control desks.

We stopped in to the post office in the basement to buy some stamps for postcards home, though the helpful clerk actually sold us some pre-stamped enveoples to put the postcards in, as they're cheaper and faster to mail that way.  I also used their ATM to augment my Euro supply, though I still had plenty left, I'm not sure how much I'll need this weekend when we visit Normandy, and cash machines will be harder to come by there.

The Louvre is really too big to see in a day, if you want to see everything.  Sure, you could physically walk by everything in one day, barely, but you wouldn't see anything, and Louvre Fatigue would set in long before you actually did it.

Fortunately, we excluded much of the museum because Holly doesn't care for much art from the 16th-19th Centuries, which is fine by me, as really, I can only take so many portraits of the Virgin Mary.  So, we decided rather quickly to concentrate on the ancient portions of the Louvre for our visit, though we did start by heading towards the Mona Lisa and the rest of the fancy French paintings.

The room containing the Mona Lisa was filled with several hundred people, who all get a few seconds in front of it, then have to move along their way.  We didn't even enter the queue, because we got a pretty good look at it from the side, and you have to stand 15 feet back from the painting, which is kept sealed in a protective glass enclosure, so I don't really know how seeing it in person is so much better than having unrestricted access to a good photograph or copy of it.  So, we saw enough to say we did it.

I have to say, that I really enjoyed the Musee D'Orsay more than the Louvre on a purely physical basis, it was far less crowded, it wasn't as stuffy and warm, and it is of a manageable size for my art attention span.

After the Mona Lisa, we saw several more famous works of French art, like the Wrath of the Medusa.  We then found our way to the Pre-Classical Greek section, and spent the next 5 hours viewing ancient Etruscan, Greek, Assyrian, Roman, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian artifacts and works of art.

Somewhere around 2:00 we noticed that we were really hungry, and after 20 minutes of searching, we managed to find our way back to the center of the Louvre where the cafeteria is.  Holly tenatively ordered something that was sort of like french toast, with a lot of cheese, and some ham in it.  She at least found it to be partially edible, only scraping off about 15% of the dish to the side of her plate.  I ordered a sandwich that was labeled "sasusage and butter", which was an extremely chewy baguette topped with salami and butter.  It was decent, though the amount of chewing involved probably made it a net caloric loss.  For those of you keeping track, the half-liter bottle of Coke we shared was 3 Euros.

After our lunch, we saw the rest of the ancient exhibits, as well as a few more modern ones trying to find our way out.  The highpoint of the museum for Holly was the Winged Victory sculpture, which she says is her favorite piece of sculpture in the world.  The highlight for me was finding the exit, as the Louvre is extermely large and hard to navigate.  They provide you with maps when you enter, but the maps represent the museum as a few different floors, but in reality the floors are not on the same plane the way they appear to be on the map.  There are dozens of staircases up and down to sub-levels, half-levels, and the maps don't reflect any of this.  Also the floors have confusing names, there are several ground floors, for instance.  Getting around is really rather frustrating, though if you're just looking to see the most famous works, there are simple signs pointing the way to the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the rest of the iconic works on display.

We exited the museum through the big glass pyramid as it started to sprinkle, and snapped some photos outside before making our way to the Tulleries metro stop around 5:00 p.m.  After getting back to the Eiffel Tower district, I picked a different route back to our hotel (despite Holly's protests on behalf of her feet) and we found a larger grocery store than the convenience store on our street.  Prices were much better in this store, as was the selection, and we loaded up on beverages to keep in our room.  We swung by the Patisserie again, and I bought a ham and cheese sandwich to have for supper, along with some Pringles-style potato chips I bought at the grocery store.  Holly had a banana, and a croissant leftover from breakfast, before she took a long soak in the bath tub and crashed for a nap.

I gave my aching legs a break, and watched a couple of DVDs that I ripped to my laptop before leaving home.  With the rainy weather outside, and our aching legs inside, we decided to spend the evening resting from our last two days of walking.

Paris: Day Two

Today, we convinced ourselves to get out of bed around 8:00 a.m., though our jet-lagged bodies despised us for it.

After showering (I love the water-wasting showerhead in the bathroom here, I wonder if I can smuggle one home) we walked down the street from the hotel to a "Patiserrie" to find something simple for breakfast.  We weren't disappointed, the croissant I had was so good, the only way I can describe it is with an analogy.  Imagine that your whole life the only pizza you ever had was frozen pizza, and not the good stuff, I mean the crappy 99 cent Totino's Party Pizza, that has a few smears of some plasticy faux cheeselike substance on it, with some cubes of pepperoni.  Now contrast that with your favorite pizza.  That is the difference between any croissant I've ever had in the US, and the croissant I had for breakfast here today.  It was light, flaky, buttery, moist, and delicious, and I'm having another one tomorrow, and it was only 2 Euros.

I told Holly that when I'm old, I'm going to find an apartment above a Patisserie in Paris, one with a dumb waiter installed, and they can just hoist freshly baked bread products up to me until I die.  Sort of like how Nicholas Cage drinks himself to death in "Leaving Las Vegas", only with way more carbs, though if Elisabeth Shue wants to come nurse me through it, that'd be okay too.  Well, present-day Shue, as she's 13 years older than me, so by the time I'm old, she'd probably be dead, or so old she'd be in no shape to support me in my carbohydrate death spiral.

Did I mention I love the bread here?

After our great breakfast (which I washed down with orange juice and my bizarre wife washed down with a 1.60 Euro Coke) we set off for the Musee D'Orsay, via the RER. 

Seth's Paris Travel Tip #4: If you're going to be seeing even a few museums, get the museum pass.  It let us skip the queue to buy tickets to the museum this morning, and let us skip the queue for people who just bought tickets, as the pass entitles you to use a separate entrance.  As they aren't beheading the aristocracy in Paris these days, you'll enjoy the trip a lot more if you aren't spending it queued with the masses.

We went into the museum through Entrance C, which is for people with reserved tickets & passholders, and then spent the next three hours looking at all sorts of French art.  We saw numerous Monets, Van Goghs, sculptures by Rodin, the famous works by Toulouse-Latrec, and even Whistler's Mother.

I'm not much of an art buff, but even I enjoyed this museum, and found myself saying "I know that piece" several times going through it.  You'll hardly know you're in France while in the museum though, as it seemed that about half of the people there were Americans, with the rest being British, German, Spanish, or Japanese.  It's definitely a touristy thing to do, but you're not going to see these things anywhere else.

After our feet had convinced us we'd seen all the art in the Musee, we crossed the River Seine to walk through the Tuileries Garden and find some lunch.  There are several Cafes in the garden, but, having learned our lesson about beverages yesterday, we kept clear of any place charging 7 Euros for a drink, which many of them did.  I wondered to myself how working people in Paris can afford to stay hydrated, as even water was upwards of 5 Euros in most of the cafes.

As we exited the garden, we found a food stand with food more in our price range, and decided to split a jambon & frommage (ham and cheese) sandwich and a 3 Euro Coke.  Ok, I'm not obsessed on the Coke prices, I'm just amused/horrified by how much they can vary within the city for something that's so cheap as to be an afterthought back home in the US.

Seth's Paris Travel Tip #5: Don't take a picky eater with you.  Now, I'm a picky eater, as anyone who read about my trip to Russia knows, but my wife is worse.  Way worse.  You'd think a ham and cheese sandwich would be fine, right?  Well, it wasn't.  I tore the sandwich in half, which was sort of like a foot-long thing on a delicious loaf of French bread.  I picked a couple slices of hard-boiled egg off mine, as I do despise eggs, and discarded the lone tomato slice too, though I can tolerate a tomato if I have to.  I bit into my tasty sandwich, and immediately said "MMMM.....that's good bread".  My wife took a bite of her half, and then exlaimed "It has mayonaisse on it!" with the inflection that I would use had I discovered my sandwich was garnished with bat guano.

Now, like I said, I'm a picky eater too, but mayonaisse has never really struck me as having a taste.  I view it more as a sandwich lubricant than a flavor to be sought or avoided.  I used to avoid it, until I consumed a couple sandwiches with it that I couldn't avoid, and discovered that it was rather inconsequential.  To Holly, however, it was the equivalent of bat guano, so she declared her half of the sandwich ruined after attempting to scrape it all off with the piece of lettuce, then offering the sorry remains to me.

I suggested she buy something else, but she didn't want to, so we set off down Champs-Elysses, just as a parade ended.  Today is VE day, and it's a national holiday here, and I'm guessing that's what the parade was about, though all we saw were the horses at the very end.

About halfway down, we encountered another food stand.  I again told her to get something she'd eat, so she ordered a hot dog.  The vendor sliced an 8-inch piece of bread off a baguette, and impaled it on a phallic metal spike to clear a hole for the hot dog, and to warm the bread.  Holly ordered her hot dog(2.5 Euros) with some mustard, and a bottle of water (2 Euros for 1 Liter) and we made it about 40 feet farther down the road before she encountered her next dietary disaster.

Besides despising mayonaisse, Holly also doesn't care for anything spicier than, say, Ragu spaghetti sauce.  Well, apparently she was expecing to get a hot dog covered in French's Yellow American Mustard out of the French hot dog vendor, not a spicier version of Grey Poupon, which is what she got.  She managed about two bites of the hot dog/mustard thing before declaring it too to be inedible, at which point I happily ate the rest of it, though I was rather full now.  The mustard was somewhat spicy, but well within my tolerance, and the hot dog was of dubious enough origin that I would have found it inedible with no mustard.

We then walked the rest of the way down Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, which is included in the attractions you can visit with the museum pass.  We hauled ourselves (me wishing I'd only had one lunch) up the 284 steps to the top of the Arc, where we saw a view to rival the one from the Eiffel Tower.  One of the neat things about the view from the Arc is that all the main streets of Paris raidate from it, and it's surrounded by a giant roundabout.  It was a bit windy, but we enjoyed the view, if not the climb.

The Arc was the last thing we had on our itinerary for today, and it was only 3:00 p.m., so we decided to head for Sacre Coeur via the Metro.  We had planned on taking the Funicular to the top of the rather large hill that the Basilica sits on, but that is indefinitely out of order, so we got to haul ourselves up several hundred more steep steps to reach the top.

The Basilica reminded me a great deal of the various cathedrals I saw 3 years ago in Russia, and Holly remarked how you are not allowed to take pictures or video in this Holy place, but it's not so Holy as to prevent them from having dozens of tables set up where you can light candles for 10 Euros each to leave burning, or too Holy to keep the gift shop full of Catholic knickknacks outside the church.  There are even several machines there that'll flatten your coins into the cheesy "Medallions" that mark tourist traps everywhere.  I fail to see how me silently using my video camera would be more sacreiligious, but apparently Jesus was a capitalist and not a videographer.

After touring the church, we decided our feet had one more attraction left in them, and caught the metro for the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery.  The Cemetary is filled with thousands of crypts, sepulchers, tombstones, and other memorials.  The elite of the dead French all make their homes here, as well as several notable foreigners.  We weren't really going to see any of the famous dead people, but Holly just likes graveyards.  She doesn't own any black lipstick, so I don't think she's a Goth chick, but she's probably close.

We did eventually locate Jim Morrison's grave, which was the only one actively guarded.  There were several neo-hippies gathered around the grave, which had flowers and various tacky notes left on it.  I made a bad pun about Jim "breaking on through to the other side", and then Holly death-marched me for several more laps around the cemetary, until my whining on behalf of my feet forced her to give in and start our trip back to the hotel.

Since Holly hadn't consumed much for lunch, I told her to pick something she knew would be "safe" for dinner, so she chose McDonald's, back by the Arc.  We had to go that way on the Metro anyhow, so we each ordered a "Royale with Cheese" which was about 6 Euros for the equivalent of a Quarter-Pounder With Cheese value meal.

Holly then declared her love for me, as she'd now eaten her personal comfort food, and we took the Metro back to the Eiffel Tower stop, and then detoured to the neighborhood grocery store before returning to the hotel.  The little grocery store had several tasty snacks and beverages at fairly reasonable prices.  A can of Pepsi there was 95 cents (Euro-cents, that is) which is positively a bargain compared to the 6 Euro can of Coke in our mini-bar.  The mini-bar is rigged with weight-sensors too, so if you remove something for longer than 20 seconds, you get billed for it.  That's too bad, as I'd like to use the refrigerator, or better yet, eat the stuff in the mini-bar and replace it with identical stuff from the grocery later.

With some snacks in hand, we returned to our hotel to call it a night, and rest up before we head to see the Louvre in the morning.

En Route

My co-worker, Chris Conklin, picked us up and took us to the Waterloo airport (the code is ALO, for the next time you want to plan your vacation to Cedar Falls/Waterloo).  We arrived about an hour and a half before our takeoff time, which is about 87 minute more than you need to navigate the Waterloo airport.

We noticed that Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) was also on our flight, but as there is no first class on the little prop planes they fly us up to Minneapolis in, he had to sit with us commoners.

In Minneapolis (MSP), we had only 40 minutes to make our connecting flight, but we made it just fine.  Fortunately, they have a tram now that ran us most of the way, as I've had it take me 40 minutes to get between gates before there, when I was lucky enough to be there on escalator and moving walkway maintenance day.

Our next flight landed us in Detroit (DTW), where we had about an hour and a half to kll before departing for Paris (CDG).  We decided to grab something to eat, as airline food is almost universally inedible.  I saw the words "Little Caesar's" on the directory, and made a beeline for it, as they closed our store about 8 years ago, and I miss their pizza.

I don't know if the airport food service people in Detroit are unionized like they are in the Las Vegas airport, but they sure do suck at their jobs.  The woman at Little Caesar's (where a handwritten sign informed us that they couldn't accept credit cards right now) gave us our pizza with only minimal contempt, but the guy behind us who wanted some crazy bread got his ass chewed, because that would take her 7 minutes to cook.  Also, they had no napkins, so I had to go steal some from Burger King.

After finishing our PIzza, I decided to grab some frozen yogurt from the TCBY next to the Little Caesar's.  The guy running this place informed me that he could ONLY accept credit cards, not cash, right now.  You'd think they could work something out with the Little Caesar's people, being as they're in the stall next door, but I digress...

While this man was dressed as someone who perhaps manages the TCBY, he would have been fired from any TCBY I was ever put in charge of.  It took me, no exagerration, repeating my order to him a grand total of SIX TIMES before he was able to make it.  Here was my complicated order:

-One regular vanilla cake cone

-One regular white chocolate mousse waffle cone

This is not rocket science.  It's not even advanced ice cream science.  Maybe someone promoted him to TCBY management to keep him away from the customers, but they didn't promote him far enough.

We put the surly food service workers behind us, and boarded our plane for Paris.

Northwest recently replaced their aged DC-10s with A330s, and boy, they're nice.  The coach seats are in a 2-4-2 arrangement across the width of the plane, and we had two seats on the right side.  Each seat comes with its own interactive video display, where you can watch movies on demand (including some unedited ones), play video games, listen to music (even make a playlist), view the GPS data for the plane, or send SMS or e-mail messages for $2.50 each (not a bargain).

Our seat also had power.  I brought my Dell laptop along, because there was a SNAFU with the order for my air adapter for my PowerBook.  Since I had one for the Dell, I chose it to bring instead, though it turns out I should have brought the PowerBook, as the new A330s have plain 'ol alternating current.  You don't need any special adapters, they have universal plugs for all countries too.  You just need to be sitting in the first 30 rows of the plane to have power.

I tried to sleep on the flight, but wasn't very successful, as the person behind me had their headphones cranked up so loud it was bothering me, and I don't sleep well on my back, much less whatever position coach seating puts you in.

After our eight hour flight, we arrived in Paris. 

D-Day

Well, we're all set to invade Europe.  Today, Holly and I depart for Paris, where we'll spend a few days, then on to Normandy, then, to London (via Paris again).  I'm not sure how much access to the Internet I'll have along the way, as the Hilton hotel chain charges an insane amount for net access there, but I'll update when and if I can.

Glacier-bound

After a nondescript motel continental breakfast, we're about to set off on the last leg of our trip to Glacier. I doubt I'll find much wi-fi there, but I've already been surprised to find Sprint PCS towers in Montana, as the Sprint coverage maps don't show them.

Hardin, MT

We've made it to Hardin, Montana, and I'm writing this from the Super 8. Their wireless doesn't work at all, but fortunately they have hard-wired ethernet in each room as well, so it doesn't really matter. When in Hardin, I suggest eating at the Purple Cow, a very local eatery with large portions and good service.

We stopped at Wall Drug, South Dakota today, as well as the Vore Buffalo Jump and the Little Bighorn Battlefield site.

Now pardon me while I go crash, I drove 600 miles today, and my biological clock is still an hour ahead of local time.

Mitchell, SD

We've made it to Mitchell, drove by the corn palace before eating at the Pizza Ranch and then crashed at the Thunderbird Lodge. I'd rate it about a 1.5-2 star, but at least they have free wi-fi!

Family Vacation

The Great Bokelman Family vacation starts today, we departed Cedar Falls, Iowa, around 1:30, and have arrived in Ventura, Iowa to pick up my grandparents before proceeding towards our final destination of Glacier National Park. Today's leg will take us as far as Mitchell, South Dakota. Home of the Corn Palace. I don't know how much internet we'll see along the way, but I'll post when I can...