France - Paris

 Hello!! =)  It's interesting in England and France if you are looking for a place with internet and you ask a local for "internet" all you will get is a dumbfounded look...  You have to say WiFi.  Or "WEE-FEE" as sounds when they say it.  =)  On with the story though - With no place to stay in Paris, we arrived and crossed the street at the station to a Cafe.  In France "Cafe's" are more than just places to grab some coffee and tea.  They are full-menued restaurants and bars as well.  We connected to the internet and ate some super interesting mussel-scallop things as well as some yummy French Bread while scouring CouchSurfing, AirB&B, and attempted to score some magic on Priceline.  As far as Hostels are concerned, we were saving them for a last resort, and booking a regular hotel without discount on Priceline as a last last resort.  We ended up landing a pretty sweet place in Montmartre, Paris, the northern part of the city and a big art district.  In case you don't know how Air B&B works, you basically rent people's houses, apartments, condos, or even just a room or portion of their place, depending.   In this case we had basically an apartment we had all to ourself with a full kitchen, etc.  We had a cool view of a courtyard, great location -> walk directly outside of the place and within direct view are a couple markets, couple Cafe's, and a 5 minute walk to the Metro.  $116 a night.






    So we headed to and found our spot while grabbing some groceries for breakfasts and snacks/picnic's and such then decided to check out a Tapas place with a bunch of unique foods.  It was a 1 minute walk from our place, but was hopping with locals till late at night so we just chilled a bit and worked on a couple things like Blog, Pics, n such from London.
    We woke up, headed to the Tube/Metro, then off to the Eiffel Tower we went!  In our Rick Steves' guidebook - Europe Through The Back Door 2012, we found a cool pathway to walk from the Metro on up to the tower (Thanks to Nick Najar for book rec) through Rue Cler.

    It was nice to mosey along and buy some of the "special" strawberries and munch on them as we walked through the marketplace and checked out various shops.  The coolest for me was a huge cheese shop, with literally several hundred cheeses and a boatload of wine.  We sampled a unique cheese I hadn't seen and then bought a cheese variety platter for later.  The Cafe's here along the Rue Cler were Packed inside and out with locals as this is THE place to go for lunch in the area.  As we finished the Rue Cler walk and began to get closer to the Tower, we began to see it.  The closer and closer I got the more amazed I was at the actual size of it, MASSIVE.  I found out that this thing is almost as tall as the Empire State Building.  It has four supports that touch the ground and in the middle there is nothing but tower above you.  To walk from one of the corners to another corner across the open center takes several minutes. 
 
 

   We got in line to get to the top of the tower to lay claim to the best view of Paris.  The line was huge because all of the lifts but one were out of order…  On top of that while we were standing outside in this line, the rain hit.  We had checked the weather earlier and it only indicated some showers and we figured we had at least another hour before they hit.  Well it hit sooner than expected, and it hit hard.  Candace grabbed an umbrella but even then and with the partial protection of the tower above us, our shoes and legs were soon soaked all the way through.  Everything happens for a reason though because as it began to torrent at us and as other people's umbrellas began to break, the challenge began..  People started dropping out of line as the rain became almost horizontal, thick, and hard.  Those who overcame the obstacle were well rewarded with a significantly shorter line and, once up top on the tower, beautiful sunny skies.  The view was pretty awesome.  It was crazy to look down -> The people just looked like small insects and you could see for miles and miles in any direction..  We grabbed our pictures as we made our way around the circular area, catching views from all angles and taking it all in.


Another cool thing to check out was to see the shadow of the Tower extend out across the land.

   We saw some more storms coming in on the horizon (above pic, upper left), black skys, and as we kept tabs on it, it soon became apparent that it was time to go.  We made our journey down and as we hit concrete again, the showers started.  No worries though because we were heading inside the biggest palace in all Europe, the Louvre!!

   They say the most visited museum in the world with over 8 million visitors a year,  this place was supremely massive.  We had read online, and in multiple guidebooks that you needed to take 2 or 3 days alone JUST to see the Louvre.  With so many items, sculptures, artifacts, paintings, sketches, tombs, statues, and unique collectables.  There are said to be 35,000 works of art on display in the Louvre and to devote 30 seconds to each, while ignoring the time taken walking from one work to the next, it would take about thirteen 24 hour days to see each piece..

   This is us from the central courtyard.  Underneath us is all stuff and to either side of us are buildings.  If you google Louvre you'll see the scope of this place more.  Basically -> there is a whole bunch of stuff most people could care less about or aren't interested in very much.  Our goal was to go check out what was available on the map, asked the Information desk some questions, which we did in Spanish, since the lady's Spanish was better than her English, and then take off, with a mission to see Just what wanted and were interested in. 

   We started in the Denon building with the Italian Pictures area.  The Mona Lisa was cool to see in person.  It was cool to see paintings that were a thousand years old and just stroll through the section.  It was so big you didn't have to spend looking at each piece, but just the ones that caught your eye to warrant additional attention.

    Then we saw Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of Love. Said to be the 1st statue of a women in the nude - 

  We also saw the statue of King Ramses II, The Victory statue (the one with the wings and without the head), and a few other super famous paintings and statues.  Among the other things viewed, my favorites included a couple of paintings, a piece in Napoleon's Quarters, and "Apartments Napoleon" -- the quarters & entertaining room themselves.  One painting I liked depicted a battle.  It just looked like a cluster with horses on top of troops, chaos everywhere, people on top of people, people battling over the sides of horses.  It made me look at it and wonder if that's how it really was, and if it was then that is what interested me. 

Another was a painting of a Father, Mother and their sick daughter.  They appeared to be praying to heal her.  For some reason I just stared at it for a while.  I liked the clothes on the dad and the realism of the daughter.

I liked Napoleon's entertaining quarters because of the cool design and style of chairs, shapes of which I had never seen in some of them, the crazy huge chandeliers, the piano, and the atmosphere of the room.

  The piece in Napoleon's quarters that was super cool was:

    We headed back to our place after our 5 hour tackle of the Louvre and them booting us out as it closed at 9:45pm.  On the way back we grabbed a bottle of wine and got back & setup our room with some super-cool lighting, the assorted cheese platter, olives, tomatoes, crackers, cucumber, more food, and Shakespeare in Love, the excellent movie with Ben Affleck and Gwenth Paltrow (which Candace and I have seen several times), and enjoyed a fine evening.

    The sun rises… and so do we, ready to have an amazing day with our packed picnic lunch and 2 labtops (we bought Candace a Macbook Air in London because it will save a bunch of time on Research, Blog, Pictures, Organization, Bookings of lodging, and it weighs less than 3 lbs anyways.  And also because she needed a new labtop anyways because hers at  home just messed up a few weeks ago), and our plan.  We start off with a walk through Montmartre and its beautiful streets, hills, and art district to Basilique du Sacré-Cœur.  On the way we picked up a fresh loaf of bread for later, a couple souvenirs, and some cappuccino Gelado.  Surprisingly, since I don't generally like Ice Cream that much (YEAH I don't like Ice Cream that much!  Weird eh!?), it tasted like, Hagan das - Coffee Ice Cream, which is my favorite.  I also don't like coffee much… just to further confuse you..  The church was bustling, the busiest inside And out of any church we has thus seen.  Outside was a beautiful panoramic of part of Paris since the building is actually set upon a hill.

     Locals were out for their afternoon walk, or afternoon chill session on the steps below the church.  There were tons of people begging, selling their wares, performing and so on.  A harp player, and a few SoccerBall Dudes (all I can call them), were out and about.  The soccer ball kids were so good with the ball that they could juggle WHILE climbing things with their arms, like lamp posts.  One guy got to the top and was juggling the soccer ball on the top part of his feet for a good minute while hanging on before he got down.

    Once we went inside and checked out the church, we headed over to a different Metro stop to get us down to The Grand Boulevard: Champs-Elysees.  Even just walking around Montemarte is beautiful and walking to the metro we realized Pars' true charm… Its in the little streets you can walk along,  in the Cafe's.  It's in the places that that locals live and relax. 

But like I was saying, we headed over to the Boulevard - a place where a dozen boulevards converge on the Arc de Triomphe.  You can't even walk to the center where the Arc is… too many cars and too wide.  Even I would think it was stupid.  ;)

    Instead we had to follow the masses and go underground through a tunnel and pop up at the Arc.  The Arc was quite beautiful with its stonework and massiveness.


    We took ourself from the Arc and followed the pathway to the Louvre from there through the Ave Des Champs Elysees.  This was a cool Commercialized walk.  Meaning, its a lot different from walking the old, soft, cobblestone, and intimate streets of the small market isleways.  Or the beauty of the streets of Montmartre.  There was every modern Prada, Sephora, McDonald's, Starbucks, and anything you can think of.  Like a big strip mall except cooler.  It was OK for a change but certainly not enchanting.  Laudree Tea Salon was quite interesting though :)

    At the end of this walkway we run into the Obelisk of Luxor, a 3300-year-old centerpiece carted here from Egypt in the 1830's, a gift to the French king at the time.  The gold-leaf diagrams on the obelisk tell the story of its laborious journey. 

    From the Obelisk, we headed towards the Louvre and the gardens in front of it for our Picnic!  Along the way we stopped for some Escargot, which was actually served IN the snail shells.  We then had to of course pick out our spot perfectly placed behind some bushes, shielding the wind, while making sure we could see the Eiffel Tower in the backdrop and still keep the Louvre shining brilliantly in front of us.  Down we ploped, and out comes the fresh loaf of bread, the hummus (which turned out to be amazing), what was left of our cheese platter, another block of cheese I bought at a market earlier, olives, cucumber, a bit of yellow hot spicy peppers, tomatoes, our portable speaker and some Mozart.

    Now, no picnic is complete without feeding the little sparrow birds and pigeons.  The would literally grab little pieces of bread from your hand.  When you were done giving them the goods for a minute, they would leave you alone, no begging.  It was kinda cool, and as we had heard, the thing to be doing during your picnic. 
 After the Louvre, we headed towards Shakespeare & Company (a famous old bookstore).  The walk was beautiful - after passing The Louvre and heading to the river, we crossed onto a bridge and just gazed at the scene around us.  The river is the place to be in Paris.  The thing to do is to grab a bottle of wine, bread or snacks and head down to the river and swing your legs over the side and relax.  Some of the locals have straight up bottles of Vodka, or cases of beers and sit around in a circle just hanging out.  Here and there will be some people knocking on some drums, but mostly people just having a good time as the long sunset drags on and on (sunlight and people will still be reading books along the river @ 10:30pm…)

   We did arrive at the bookstore though, which is an antique in and of itself.  Books stacked to the ceiling, every inch of space used, this place used to be a publishing company and library, and editing house and more: clubhouse, post office, bank, etc.  Members of the club included Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot, George Moore, and more.  Now it's just a Bookstore.  No Photos on the 1st floor, where all the new books are.  Heh.  The second floor was pretty sweet.  Most of the books are not for sale, just for reading on the second floor and there are several places to lounge around and read as well as a room specifically for a typewriter, and a piano room filled with books.  Luckily a local was showing off to a girl his piano skills and was playing the piano the whole time we were there.  He was pretty good and I enjoyed listening as I read various old books, like 100 Years, a cool old book that summarized each year in world history.  Taking a chapter per year for 100 chapters, each chapter had a few different cities it would use to talk about world events.  It was cool to see a map of The Americas before Phoenix was even around.

    Before I headed out I caught a glimpse of the new Dark Tower book, The Wind Through The Keyhole, and I sat down and read a couple chapters real quick.  Prolly will need to grab this on my Kindle soon.  In the meantime I'm onto a book called The Game-Players Of Titan, I'm borrowing from James.   Once out of the store, we gazed upon Notre Dame and decided to walk over and check it out.  After all, it was just across the river.  =)  Beautiful.  Large.  Intricate.  Closed, but it was cool to see the outside.  It also led us to rollerskaters jumping off ramps, people rapping, a crystal ball mover guy, and a lady swinging fire around.  Super distracting, super cool. 

  Walking back along the river towards the Louvre, we decided to walk among the locals right down on the riverbed.  Very cool to see the culture like this, the river hangout reminds me of the people hanging out in the Plazas of Spain from my time studying abroad.

Beautiful place.

You can see the Eiffel Tower lit up in the background, the Louvre to the right.  We ended at Le Fumoir, a cool cafe we had heard of with free WEEFEE (haha).  Busting out our labtops, sipping on some Absinthye, we pounded out our route for the next day to Nice and lodging. 

Bye bye Paris, we will miss you!…

    Ending the night with a metro trip home, we ended up missing our connection by 2 minutes and the metros were closed (2am).  Another adventure begins as we fight for a taxi with all the drunk locals and tourists and finally 45 minutes later, in front of the Obleisk, end up sharing a taxi with a local who spoke excellent English.  Who also in the end tried to pay for the taxi herself before I forced her to take some Euros!  Overall an excellent day.

    As I write this I'm on a a train to Nice, a city at the southern tip of France.  Although I won't be able to post until I connect to the internet, this 6 hour train-ride has just recently turned quite beautiful as, we are now heading along the coast of the Mediterranean going east right now.  It Reminds me of Costa Rica, with the little bays and hilly oceanfronts with houses crowded all in them.  Except better.  I'm seeing Castles on the water, beautiful bay after bay with boats and Islands right off the coast.  This ride is getting very exciting, and I'm hoping Nice delivers as well.  Talk soon!  Yours,

 Jason & Candace