On the first day in Paris, Julia had a meeting all day so I went out and saw the sights. Well some of the sights. We had already been in Paris before and had seen the Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysées and l'Arch de Triomphe so I skipped those. After dropping Julia off at l'Université de Marie et Pierre Currie I went to l'Ile de la Cité, a small island in the middle of the Seine river, where I found Notre Dame Cathedral.
Here it is from the south side of the river.
The front.
And the little park behind it with a gothic spire. I felt that the grandiose looking outside looked better than the very dark inside, probably because, in my head, I was comparing to the church we saw in Salzburg which was very bright and lovely.
Crazy looking chandelier displayed on the floor.
Very nice stained glass windows.
It looks brighter here than it really was... and nicer
The altar.
I front of the cathedral is a nice big open spot so you can have an unobstructed view of it and off to the side is a statue of Charles de Gaule on his trusty steed being pulled by his trusty steed puller.
After that I walked along the seine...
... to the other end of the island and met some super chill/urbanized ducks. They were drinking Starbucks! No, not really, but they kept sleeping as I got closer and closer.
I was almost on them before they moved at all and they only moved to let me know that they thought I was annoying and had disturbed their sleep. I was probably close enough that I could have grabbed one of them. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. I've tried this kind of thing before, although never successfully.
Look at those annoyed billed faces.
At the other end of the island was another little park with a surprisingly high lawn to gravel ratio. In our experience, park grounds in cities in France usually consist of large graveled surfaces and sometimes a tree or two. But this park, probably because it was quite small, was all lawn except for the path that went around it. It also had this plaque next to a rock.
If you click on the picture you will probably be able to read it, but of course it's in French. The plaque explains that the rock is from l'Ile Ste Hélène in Montréal and was given to the city of Paris as a testimony to French-Canadian friendship and placed in this park on the 26th of April 1967, the inaugural day of Expo 67.
Then I went back south of the island towards the university to eventually meet up with Julia. On the way I saw
the Fontaine des quatres Évèques (fountain of the four bishops) in front of the St-Sulpice Cathedrale;
the Panthéon, which is a church or was supposed to be a church or designed to be a church, either way there's a lot of important dead people in its crypt like every other church in Europe;
and the Jardin du Luxembourg, which houses the French Senat (the building off to the left not seen in here). Again, a surprising amount of green for a French park. There's also a lot of gravel behind me in this picture.
The next day, we went to buy lots of silk in the Montmartre region where we were staying. You can read about that below if you haven't already.
Sunday we made our way to the Louvre. We walked there and went through the violin maker district. On this street for few block every other shop was a "lutier".
Then we saw the craziest looking McDonald's ever. It's hard to describe but you can see a wooden statue of a king. It's used to be called "le Roi des Bières", the King of Beers. We know that because the name was still the tile work on the floor at the entrance. Notice also the large stork on the roof; not normally associated with McDonald's.
We saw a couple of funny signs:
"Posting signs is forbidden",
Stranger than what, I wonder. (This is of course a poor translation of "vins étrangers", or foreign wines.)
We saw the giant steel spider again in the park behind the Louvre. We also saw this or one like this in
London and in Ottawa. I think there's about 8 of them and they roam the globe.
Then we made it to the Louvre. The entrance was designed by Chinese-American architect IM Pei at the request of François Mitterand in the 1980s during a modernization of the museum. Apparently the French were mighty upset at the time that the architect was foreign and that the architecture was so modern. What, you mean Europeans weren't open to change and new ideas?
The Louvre is ridiculously big and houses a lot of historic art. Knowing that we wouldn't be able to see all of it in the hour and a half that we had left before it closed, we stuck to the big thing we had often seen in Warner Brother cartoons, like:
La Joconde, the Mona Lisa and;
The Venus de Milo. What you can't see in this picture is all the people taking pictures of Julia inconsequentially in the same room.
We also saw a lot of stuff while going from one place icon to another. Like this headless statue of winged victory.
Julia is also fascinated by how people lived and wanted to see the Napoleonic apartments. Here she's in Naps's modest dinning room.
Only three giant chandeliers. Can you even call that a dinning room?
We also wanted to see the Code of Hammurabi but it had been taken to another room that had a temporary Babylonian exhibit with pieces from the British Museum and we didn't have tickets for than one.
Monday Julia had another meeting. And I went back to the fabric district to get some things we couldn't find last time. After finding almost everything we needed in an exhaustive search of Montmartre, I went up the hill to see the Cathedral;
and the view.
There was also a harpist busking.
That night we tried to go see "There Will Be Blood" that was being shown in English at a near-by cineplex but they were sold out. Instead we saw the critically acclaimed "The Orphanage", a Spanish horror movie (with French subtitles) about a woman who grew up in an orphanage and who now is trying to open an orphanage of her own in the same house. It's really scary. In fact, it was so scary that Julia broke into a fever. Actually she got sick but the scariness may have weakened her immune system. She's all better now, but the fever, chills, and aches made the 9 hour trip home the next morning less than pleasant.
And decided to go to hang out at McDonald's.
Unfortunately we were only 15 and that's how many people you need for a full team, which means no substitutions and also no pictures of the game. But here's me after the game, still in one piece despite our crushing 69-3 defeat. Good job on that field goal, Kevin. The guys we were playing against usually play in the league above ours, so at least we weren't surprised.
Here's Brent, another Canadian on the team. He usually tells me what the hell is going on when the German gets too complicated.
Post-crushing defeat smoke break. Actually I think only two of them are smokers.
After that we had a beer in the dressing room, a beer on the way back and a beer at the Irish pub. Although we got destroyed (on the field) I learned a lot and hopefully well do better next time. Today I'm sore.
