Pictures:

May 27

May 28

May 29

Plan: Sightseeing in Paris. Sights to see include the Louvre, Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysees, catacombs, Orsay Museum and various neighborhoods.

What really happened (per Christine): Bon jour from Paris! We got up early and took the tube to the Waterloo Train Station to go on the Eurostar through the chunnel to Paris. The Eurostar station is like a mini-airport, you have to go through a security checkpoint again, get a 2nd visa stamp in your passport, and everything; I hope my film will be okay with so many x-ray exposures. We made it on board the Eurostar with egg and cheese bagels from a bagel shop and settled in for our 2.5 hour trip to France. The seats were comfy, but the ride was kind of boring, other than having our ears pop a lot from the pressure changes (I guess you get that when you go under the ocean!).

When we got to France, we were very glad to have recently mastered the London Underground. Paris' Metro is a lot like the London Underground, except dirtier, less well-manned and all in French. We figured out how to get tickets from a real live person after the machine refused to read our credit card, but couldn't figure out how to make the turnstyles work (we found out later that those turnstyles were broken). The Paris Metro operates kind of like a combination of the London Underground and our own St. Louis Metrolink: you need a ticket to put in the turnstyle to get in, but then you just leave out any non turn-style exit and ticket inspectors are supposed to periodically check to make sure you have the proper ticket. We never got checked the entire time in Paris.

Anyway, we made is successfully to Ecole Militaire station, which deposited us directly in front of the door to our hotel, the Hotel Royal Phare. What luck! We went to check in and I guess we were a bit early, because they didn't have a room clean yet, they said to give them 10 minutes and it would be ready. The desk guy argued with someone in French (not sure what about - maybe about the rooms not being cleaned yet??), but was polite to us. He seemed very busy as a group came just after us and people kept calling on the phone. Eventually we got the keys to our room and found out we were in room 44, on the fourth floor (French), but actually 6 stories up (a staircase up to the registration desk, which was on ground floor, then 1-2-3-4 floors. That is a lot of stairs with our suitcases, but we started up. Then we realized they had an elevator. We were saved! Until we opened up the elevator. It was the tiniest elevator I have ever seen. Our two (carry-on) size suitcases fit inside and I could stand (very squished) between them. When the door closed, it was like being in a coffin; very claustrophobic. Mike refused to get on and probably wouldn't even have fit by himself while wearing his bookbag. But, we got the suitcases up that way. Our room was quite nice; fairly small, but we had certainly had smaller. I think there was room for two people to walk abreast on each of the three sides of the bed. The bathroom was pretty typical, too, though it was a corner unit with just a shower curtain (most corner showers up to this time had shower doors). It did not have air conditioning, which was a shame as it was very hot (>85 degrees F), especially with us just having adjusted our body temperatures to very cold London. It did have a big window that opened out to a bunch of other people's windows :-) I understand that some of the higher rooms have views of the Eiffel Tower, but ours did not. Once we had got rid of our bags and gotten out our French phrase book, we were set to go out and take on Paris.

First we turned left out the front door, looking for the entrance to Ecole Militaire station (the exit in front of our door was an up-escalator) and someplace to eat. We ended up stumbling upon the Rue Cler, a beautiful street filled with cafes, fruit and flower markets, boucheries (bakeries), fromageries (cheese shops), butchers, chocolateries, etc. We thought about getting the makings for a picnic, but got intimidated when we went to a boucherie to see what they had and had to look at a million things just to find out that those sandwiches were tuna. It is really difficult to find vegetarian food if you don't know the language. We walked the length of the Rue Cler and finally Mike said "Let's eat here." It was a cafe and creperie called "Ulysee's". We sat down and they gave us a menu. We must have looked panicked when he came to take our order because we couldn't figure anything out. I told him I was vegetarian and we spoke english. Luckily, he spoke a little english; he told us he had stuffed meat, tomatoes, peppers or eggplant for the plat du jour (special of the day). Mike and I both picked stuffed peppers and it was one of the best meals we've had in Europe to date. It was peppers stuffed with rice and a little cheese. A salad, a vegetable dish (I have no idea what it was - I thought maybe okra, Mike thought asparagus, but it was very tender and cooked in a tomato sauce) and spiced roasted potato wedges. Red wine was included, as was a desert crepe. (I had a crepe sucree- a sugar and cinnamon crepe and Mike had a crepe fraise - a strawberry jelly crepe). It was awesome and pretty cheap (15 Euros each). We totally lucked out for our first gastronomical encounter.

Thoroughly nourished, we went to the Orsay Museum. The Orsay is an old train station that was scheduled for demolition in the 1970s, when they decided it would be a great place to house France's "modern" art of the 1800-1900s. It is a great place for Impressionist art, so we went to see the Impressionist collection first. We got the English audio guide because all of the descriptions were in French, but it wasn't worth it, because hardly any of the pictures were included in the audio guide. The Impressionist section was on the 5th floor of the museum and each floor was like two regular floors worth of stairs, so Mike and I were dying by the time we got to the top (of course we hadn't found the escalators). To top it off, the top floors of the museum weren't air conditioned very well and had masses of people, so it was very hot up there. But it was worth it in the end, as it was one of the greatest collections of Impressionist art. We saw Whistler's Mother and lots of instantly recognizable works by Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Gaugain...it was pretty cool. We stayed there until almost closing time at 5pm, then walked quickly through an alternate path back to the front door.

We then took the Metro to the Champs-Elysee and and walked down the boulevard people-watching all the way up to the Arc de Triomphe. We saw several groups of what I think were Bachelorette parties (groups of girls, one all dressed up in some silly costume), as it was a Friday night. It was alot of fun. On our way up the street, we heard a huge noise that sounded like a very loud gunshot or maybe a bomb. I was about ready to take off when I heard this and started paying attention to my surroundings and realized that there were all kinds of police around and a big empty space in the crowd and traffic. Mike quickly figured out what was going on. Apparently, the police had found an unattended bag on the sidewalk, so they had blocked off all the foot and car traffic (it was on the other side of the street, which was why we hadn't noticed), and set off some sort of charge to detonate the bag in case it was a bomb. It wasn't, so they just re-opened the street to let people through. A little scary.

When we got to the Arc de Triomphe, we couldn't find a way to get to it at first because of construction on the underpasses. (The Arc de Triomphe is a circular merging of 12 streets, you don't just walk across the street). We eventually found it and got to the monument. Unfortunately, the elevator to the top was under construction; they only operational elevator was for disabled people only. We really wanted the view from the top, so we got climbing. 270 spiral stairs later, with no landings, we ended up, breathing heavy, hearts pounding, ready to pass out, at the top. The view was, luckily, very cool. And the breeze felt very good. After taking a lot of pictures, we steeled ourselves to head back down. We were in luck once again because a maintenance man was taking trash down the disabled elevator just as we passed, and he let the people ahead of us and us hitch a ride down. Yeah!

After the Arc de Triomphe, we wanted to round off our day with the Eiffel Tower, though we weren't going to do any more stairs! We took the Metro near the Eiffel Tower and decided to fortify ourselves with drinks and snacks in a little restaurant just off the metro. This was our first scamming, so beware all who come to Europe after us: the restaurant had reasonable prices for the food in the window. We went in and immediately ordered two lemonades, because we were thirsty. We didn't even look at the menu. My medium lemonade was 7 Euros (about $9) and Mike's large lemonade was 9 Euros (about $12) - some of the most expensive drinks we've ever had. Apparently, this is a very common tactic we have found in touristed areas, to charge outrageous amounts for drinks. The best bet is to always look at the drink menu first and pick the cheapest thing off it (even water was usually 3 Euros (about $4), but that's better than $12) and just buy bottled water to carry with you. While the drinks were high, the food was good, Mike had an excellent fruit platter and I had a cheese platter with bread and we shared for a very nice snack/dinner to fortify us after our stair climb.

After that, we walked to the Eiffel Tower. We had lots of fly-by-night salespeople trying to sell us Eiffel Tower paraphernalia. Our favorite was the guy who shoved a multi-colored light-up Eiffel Tower in our faces and asked us if we wanted "bling-bling". No, thanks, but now we certainly had a code word for all the cheap tourist crud that the vendors try to sell you. As we were walking towards the Eiffel Tower, which was lit up as it was starting to get dark, it suddenly started sparkling! Apparently, for the first 10 minutes of every hour after 10pm, they turn on these random white lights all over the tower, which gives it the appearance of "sparkling". It was beautiful! And it was like magic, lighting up just for us as we walked up to it! I'm not sure if the sparkling is a permanent new thing on the Tower, or if it is just a part of Paris's bid to get the Summer 2012 Olympics (London was in the running, too). Either way, it was very cool! We did find out that the top of the Eiffel Tower closed at 10pm, so we couldn't go there, so we elected to go up to the second platform (a little over halfway up). We waited in line for almost an hour and were on the last group to get to go up. Mike was really nervous on the elevator; it was really shaky and you could see off the sides, so it gave the illusion of being lifted out in the open. The view from the second platform was great. I'm glad we didn't go to the top; it might've been too scary. We got lots of good pictures and saw a huge bike ride (sort of like a Moonlight Ramble), going on down below the Tower. When we finally came back down, we walked through the park back to our hotel and it was like a huge party. People (mostly young people), were just hanging out on blankets in the park, people were playing music, dancing, singing. I don't know if it was the eventual end of the bike race or possibly a political rally for the (we found out later) vote on the European Union constitution the next day, but it was really cool to watch. We ended up, once again exhausted, at our hotel!

Plan: More sightseeing in Paris.

What really happened (per Christine): The day dawned hot, though not quite as hot as yesterday. We were really tired, but we were going to the Louvre. We went back to the Ulysses cafe we had eaten at the day before and got breakfast crepes: I got a cheese crepe (good, but too much cheese in my opinion); Mike got a crepe especial with eggs, cheese, peppers, onions and tomatoes and he loved it.

We took the Metro to the Louvre and went in through the underground mall, so we didn't see the grand pyramid entrance, but we did see the inverted pyramid (significant to those of you who have read "The Da Vinci Code." There was another X-ray machine for bags (I really hope my film will be alright), but we were soon in. The Louvre is another huge maze of a museum. We wanted to first go and see the "Grand Gallery," with the famous (or infamous) Mona Lisa, since we didn't want to miss that. But trying to find it was another story. We ended up going through a bunch of cool ancient Iranian statuary, then we hit the Egyptian stuff (not quite as good as the British Museum's, but still fairly impressive). We kept looking for cat hieroglyphics, but never did find any. There were, of course, plenty of statues of Ramses II, insecure pharaoh that he was. We finally made our way out of Egypt (or at least the Egyptian section :-) and got to the Greek statuary. We saw the Venus de Milo and lots of other cool statues. We looked for Mike's Dad's favorite piece from the Louvre of the Three Graces (or is it the Three Muses), but we couldn't find it. I suspect we may have missed some of the Greek rooms, however. We then saw signs pointed to "La Jaconde" (the Mona Lisa), so we followed the signs, past Winged Victory to the Grand Gallery (where we just kept passing masterpiece after masterpiece) onto a new separate room for the Mona Lisa. You actually had to wait in line to get up close; we got some pictures of the crowd just to get to see her. We then walked the length of the Grand Gallery (really long..probably the equivalent of several city blocks) and realized that it was a dead-end so we had to go all the way back. By this time, we were getting a little museum-ed out, so we went to go and find a statue of a gnome on a snail that Mike had read about and then we wandered through some geometric Islamic art on our way out the door. We found out on a later tour that if you stood in front of each piece in the Louvre for just 3 seconds each, you would have to be there for 3 and a half months to see the entire collection, so I didn't feel so bad about our rapid pace through the museum. When we finished with the museum, we ate lunch in the food court at the underground mall (which was quite a bit nicer than a US mall food court). We went to (I think) a Moroccan restaurant and got a selection of cold "salads" (a salad not like a US salad with lettuce, but a selection of cold fruits and grains): cucumber salad, couscous, carrots, beets (for Mike) and lima beans or some other related bean (for me). It was really good.

After the Louvre, we went back to Gare du Nord to get train reservations. What a nightmare! You see, we have Eurail passes, but the owners of the various train lines can decide that they want to charge you extra and require that you get a reservation to ride their train. I didn't do it in the States, because I wanted some flexibility while in Europe. So, we had to first find the reservation window (a problem of itself, since Gare du Nord was so big), then find someway to communicate to them we wanted a reservation to Germany. We did get one, but it was on a later train than we wanted, so we were going to have to amend our plans in Germany. We also tried to get reservations for later in the trip (since, according to Rick Steve's, you could get reservations for anywhere in Europe at any train station, but we found that wasn't true). The ticket guy said we had to make our reservations in Germany for Germany, so we were a little bummed about that. It might have been easier to not have railpasses in Europe, because then we could have just gotten our tickets/reservations at the automated ticket machines. Owell.

After the train station, we took the Metro to Ile de la Cite to see Notre Dame. It was too late to go in, but the doors were open, so we went in and found out they were having mass. We quickly took ourselves out. We wandered over to find a boat ride on the Seine and ran across some rollerbladers/skaters who had set up a wooden ramp and were doing all sorts of trick jumping on the ramp. It was a little weird, because they weren't collecting money that we could see; I guess they were just practicing or performing for fun. It was a little bit like seeing the performers in Jackson Square in New Orleans; they did flips and started having a reverse limbo contest to see how high they could jump over a pole. It was pretty cool. We found out that we had gone to the wrong boat (the expensive one), so we started walking to the other side of the island to catch Les Vedettes du Pont-Neuf (a tour boat of the Seine). It was a one-hour tour down to the Eiffel Tower, then back up past Ile de la Cite, around the Ile de Saint Louis and back to the Pont-Neuf. We mostly saw a lot of bridges; apparently Paris has 34 bridges across the Seine! It was quite a nice, breezy boat ride.

After we got done with our tour, we took the Metro back to our hotel. We were a little hungry, not enough for a meal, so we looked around for a snack. The grocery stores and markets were closed and we didn't want a whole (expensive) meal at a cafe, so we went into a little specialty store. Here was where we got scammed our second time (or maybe it was an honest mistake, I don't know). None of the shopkeepers spoke English, so we had to find what we wanted and point to it and use our phrase book. We finally got cookies, wine and ice cream (I know, what a combination). The person who got our stuff together wrote down what we got on a receipt and then we took it to the cashier to pay. The first guy wrote the wrong thing on the ticket, so we got charged three times as much as we should have for our cookies, but we didn't realize it till we were already out of the store, so owell. At least they were really good cookies at $2.50 a piece :-) We ate our snacks, watched a little Lord of the Rings on Mike's laptop, did a little laundry and hit the hay.

Plan: On Sunday, we will take the Metro to Versailles. On Sundays during the Summer, the fountains of Versailles are turned on.

What really happened (per Christine): We planned to go to Versailles today and we did. We took the metro to the RER line that would take us to Versailles and were told that it wasn't working that day. Luckily, they gave us written directions for an alternate route, so we had to go to a new Metro station and take an SNCF train to Versailles (yes, Paris couldn't be more confusing with 3 different trains in town, each which needs separate tickets - luckily our Eurail pass covered RER and SNCF). Unfortunately, the alternate way to Versailles took us to a train station about a mile from Versailles, so we had a little walk to get there.

Once we got to Versailles, we were mostly interested in the gardens, so we started on those first. The gardens are amazing! First of all, they are absolutely huge! And perfectly manicured. While Blenheim had nicer, more natural gardens, Versailles was definitely a feat of man taming nature; it was very, very orderly. There was a huge canal down stairs from the palace. We read that to walk from the palace to the far end of the Grand Canal would take an hour, so that meant it would be about 4 miles long! We first ate breakfast/lunch at a little cafe in the gardens. I had an omlette avec frommage (omlet with cheese) and Mike had a cheese crepe (not as good as the guy in the Rue Cler) and a cheese and tomato baguette sandwich. After food, we wandered among the upper gardens for a couple of hours. We then walked down to the lake and rented a rowboat for an hour - Mike got to row the boat about halfway down the lake. We (Mike) then rowed back because it was almost time for them to turn on the fountains since it was a "spray day". Originally, Versailles had 1200 fountains. Most of the fountains were lost; there are now 300. Louis XIV diverted a river to power the fountains in the 1600s and they still work the same way today, like plugging your finger over a hose and then letting it go. They turn the fountains on on Sundays for 1.5 hours in the morning and 1.5 hours in the afternoon. I had been expecting something like the fountains at Bellagio, but it was both more and less cool than that. The fountains didn't move or dance, but all the fountains in the garden were on, not just one area, so you could re-explore the whole garden and come upon new delightful fountains. If you went up on the hill by the palace, you could see over all the neat treetops and see jets of water shooting out all over the gardens. We had missed the morning spray, but the afternoon spray was awesome. After the afternoon spray, they had a "grand finale" at the fountains of Neptune, so Mike and I got there early and got a really good seat across the lake from the big fountain. It was lots of fun. It was a little cool and started raining just a bit, but not too bad.

After the fountain sprays were over, we went through the palace. It was mostly empty rooms, because most of the furniture was looted in the Revolution. There were one or two original pieces plus some furniture that was contemporary with Louis XVI, but had not been in the palace originally. We were really looking forward to the Hall of Mirrors (where the Treaty of Versailles was signed), but it was being restored, so half of it was behind drywall. The half that was opened did look like it could use some restoration; the mirrors and paintings were quite dingy, but it still had the best view out the back of the palace over the gardens. We didn't end up leaving until the place closed at 1800. Then we had the long trek back to the SNCF station. We were really ready for a rest on the train to Germany the next day after having done so much in Paris!

May 27

May 28

May 29