Paris: Day Four

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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.

Paris: Day Three

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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

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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.

Paris: Day One

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We arrived in Paris around 11:00 a.m. local time, and then spent about half an hour taxiing around the airport before the plane parked, then we walked down a ramp to the tarmac, where a series of busses took us to the actual airport.  The driver seemed to not care that he had people in the back of the bus, a bus with no seats, mind you, just some rails to grab ahold of.  Now, I know that you can go through turns faster by accelerating into them, but it wouldn't occur to me to try it with human cargo in the back of a 40 foot bus, but it didn't stop him.  When two people who have spent as much time riding on hay racks as Holly and I nearly lose our footing, you know it's bad.  I heard some of the other passengers gasp as they tried to hold on for dear life.

We made our way to passport control then, which was such a confusing mess that even the French people in our plane couldn't find the line dedicated to them.  It took us about 20 minutes to make our way through the queue.  The officer didn't even look at the silly yellow card they make you fill out on the air plane, and then he neglected to stamp my passport as well.  Holly's was stamped, as she went to a different officer, so maybe she'll be allowed to leave, and I have to stay here?  I'm sure it'll bite me in the ass later.

We collected our luggage, and then proceeded to break our first law, which has to be a record, even for me.  I knew we wanted to take the RER trains to our hotel, and so I purchased two tickets from one of the automated machines.  This wasn't difficult, you just told the machine you wanted to go to Paris, and that you wanted quantity of 2 tickets.

So, I walked through the turnstile with my ticket and luggage, and then Holly attempted to follow me.  Even though the automated machines took my ticket, it wouldn't take hers, and there was no one in sight to help us, so, with my encouragement, she jumped the turnstile.  Somehow I doubt we're going to wind up on France's Most Wanted for this, and we had purchased a valid ticket, but we felt like rebels.

After a half-hour ride to the Notre Dame station, where we had to change trains, we met a frenchman who detected from our general cluelessness that we were lost, and he helped guide us to the right platform to make our connection.  He also helped me find the ticket counter to buy a ticket for that next leg, and started to explain how the "Visite" passed work, but we'd already purchased those before leaving home, so I didn't need that much help.

I then annoyed the ticket counter keeper by charging the 4 Euro fare to my Visa card, but I'm hoarding the currency, as it's a pain to get more, and I don't want to waste it when I can use plastic.

It took me a few minutes to find my way back to where I'd left Holly (at the Frenchman's urging) by the platform with our tickets, as the RER stations aren't quite as well-marked as the Metro stations, and they're darker and probably have a higher urine content as well.

We made our way onto the RER train, and headed towards the Eiffel Tower stop, as we're staying at the Hilton Paris hotel, which is quite near it.  I knew our hotel was only a couple of blocks from the train stop, so I figured we'd spot it easily.  We exited the train station and began walking down the street, but didn't spot the hotel.  After about 5 blocks, and some nagging from my wife about the state of her bladder, I dug out the paper which showed the address of the Hotel, and realized we'd gone three blocks too far.  We retraced our steps, then realized how easy it was to miss the Hotel, because there are literally no markings on that street to indicate that it's a Hilton, but if you pay close attention, the H logo is on one of the glass doors.  If you go to the North side of the building (which is not the street given as the address), that's where the main hotel entrance is, you just can't see it from where we were.

I declined the four offers from various hotel staff to carry my luggage while thinking  "I lugged it from Charles De Gaulle, I can manage the last 50 feet on my own, and I'm not giving you a tip."

This brings me to Seth's Paris Travel Tip #1: This is probably going to sound like a commercial, but it's not.  I used Hotwire.com to book our hotel, and saved a fortune.  The Hilton Paris has a "rack rate" of $289/night, and via Hotwire.com I paid $116/night for our hotel.  The downside of Hotwire is that you can't see what hotel you're buying until you pay for it, but you can use BetterBidding.com to "decode" the Hotwire star ratings and amenities, and usually narrow it to one or two hotels that fit the description.  In the case of the Hilton Paris, it's the only one in the area that fits the BetterBidding.com profile, and it's very nice hotel for the same amount as you can spend on far worse hotels elsewhere in town.

We checked in around 2:00 with a girl who spoke English so well, I'm not sure if she was French or not, though I think she was.  In any case, we got a room on the first floor (up one floor from the lobby) with a view of the Eiffel Tower.  I was encouraged by that, as often Hotwire customers get the crappier rooms, because we pay super discounted rates, but I can't complain about this one.  Our room is pretty large by European hotel standards, though it has twin beds, which is another European hotel standard, though the girl at the desk told us to just push them together.

We reached our room, then dropped everything and crashed for a two-hour nap, as it had been a short night.

We managed to drag ourselves out of bed around 4 p.m. and showered before setting off to see the Eiffel Tower.  It's only a few hundred yards away, and we weren't feeling ambitious enough to venture farther into the city.  We walked towards the tower, saw the rather long lines, and decided we should eat first, as we were both pretty hungry.

On one of the sidestreets near our hotel we found a cafe with the magic word "cheeseburger" on the menu, though listed at a price of 10 Euros, which, while not cheap, was about what we were willing to pay, as we were pretty hungry.

A waiter showed us to a tiny table inside the smoky cafe, and we each ordered the Cheeseburger & Frites (fries) as well as a Coke.  Herein lies Seth's Paris Travel Tip #2: Always find out the price of your beverage before ordering it.  After eating our cheesburgers, which contained so little beef that they make a McDonald's cheeseburger seem positively beefy, and the fries, which were actually quite good, and quite a large serving, we had the displeasure of receiving our bill (after I had to ask for it, 15 minutes after we finished our meal).  I need to check the travel book, as this may be the custom in France, and it just didn't sink in, so I'm not judging the place based on me having to request the check.

However, I will not be going back, as I was shocked to be given a bill for 36 Euros, or about 48 dollars.  While our cheeseburgers & frites were only 10 Euros, the "medium Cokes" were 8 Euros each, which is about 11 bucks.  Holy shit, an 11 dollar Coke.  I thought the 6 Euro Coke in my hotel mini-bar was high, but thus we learned the importance of pricing not only meals, but beverages as well.

I paid the check, while trying not to think about dropping 50 bucks on sub-par burgers, when we could have had fillets at the best restaurant in town back home for what I just spent, and headed back towards the Eiffel Tower.

Seth's Paris Travel Tip #3: We bought tickets, and stood in 3 separate queues to reach the top of the Eiffel Tower.  There's really no reason to go above the second tier, however, as the top tower is more expensive, takes longer, and the view is worse.  It's kind of neat to be at the top when the wind is blowing at 60mph like it was while we were there, but you're so far up in the air that you're looking down on the rooftops of the city, rather than getting a good view of it.  The second tier is cheaper, avoids the longest queue, and you can walk down, rather than having to wait in yet another queue to do that.

Since we didn't have my advice, we went to the top, though Holly was rather uncomfortable riding in the glass elevator all the way up there, as she's a bit of a wimp.  The view from the Tower is really spectacular, though, and going early in your stay gives you a good feel for the various landmarks, and the relative distances involved when visiting them.

We got a bit chilled out on the platform, as it was qutie windy, and the sun was going down, so we risked our mouths on a shared 3 Euro cup of hot chocolate, which was served at approximately 211 degrees F, so we sat around starting at it for another 10 minutes until it cooled to a drinkable termperature.

After making our way back down the elevator to the second tier, with the best view, we decided to take the stairs the rest of the way down, as to avoid yet another queue.  It seems like walking down stairs should be easy, but the Eiffel Tower is very tall.  By the time we reached the bottom, we were pretty well beat, and after snapping some more photos of the tower at night, we limped back to our hotel room, and promptly crashed, but not before enjoying a brief but spectacular light show on the Tower, when they made it sparkle.  Ironically, I wasn't looking out the window at it, but was watching CNN, where they were covering the French election results, and the Tower was sparkling behind the reporter they were talking to via Satellite, so I looked out the window, and sure enough, it was sparkling here too.  I'm not sure what schedule the "sparkling" effect is on, but it's rather spectacular, especially when you can see it from your bed.

En Route

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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. 

John McCain - Without Honor

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I used to really like John McCain.  Even though he was a Republican and I'm a Democrat, I felt he had honor and integrity, and he was usually above taking cheap political shots and toeing the party line.  He was also a Republican candidate that I could envision voting for.  Had the 2004 election been between McCain and Kerry, I'd have voted for McCain.  However, McCain's appearance on The Daily Show last night pretty much ended him as a viable candidate in 2008 to me. 



When McCain started courting the base of the Republican party, people who he'd previously (and rightly) criticized for their intolerance, I got a little concerned, but figured he was just leaning enough their way to get enough necessary support to be a viable candidate.

Last night, in the second segment of his debate/interview, Stewart gave McCain a chance to show that he still had honor, but McCain failed.  When Stewart asked McCain to agree that wanting a timetable or criticizing the president doesn't mean "you don't support the troops" and McCain started spouting more talking points about surrender and defeat, it was clear that the Straight Talk Express has turned into the Talking Point Freight Train.  Does McCain think that the only way to gain the Republican nomination is to become George Bush's surrogate Press Secretary?  Has he seen Bush's approval numbers?  Now is the time for realism, not surrealistic idealism.

Dear Senator McCain, here is the proper response to that question, that does not attempt to turn people with a legitimate political disagreement with you into unpatriotic monsters:

"I understand that there are many good and patriotic Americans who love their country, who have friends and family serving in the armed forces that they're concerned about, and they want to bring them home to safety.  Expressing that concern doesn't mean they don't support the troops, it just means we need to do a better job of convincing the nation that the consequences of failure in Iraq are dire. The brave men and women of our armed forces have served our country valiantly in a difficult situation in Iraq, and unfortunately, their country has to ask them to continue to serve."

That, Senator McCain, is an honorable answer that shows that you're someone who is reasonable.  Someone who doesn't attempt to paint his opponents as unpatriotic, and who is sure enough of his positions that he can fully explore the ideas of someone who disagrees with him without resorting to a ridiculous pissing contest of who has the most yellow ribbons tied on to "support the troops".