Bonjour!

We’ve been in Paris for 2 days and have been having a good time, though I won’t romanticize like so many others and say that it’s an amazing place, filled with love and “magic” in the air.  It’s a city, a busy and rather dirty one.  I love seeing the sights but hate having to watch over my shoulder for pick-pockets.

After arriving at the airport in Paris, we stopped by the Louvre to find a line half a mile long.  We grabbed a taxi to our hostel and then walked to the Eiffel Tower.  The police were out in force, suiting up in riot gear.  It might be due to the recent terrorist threats in Europe or the “tradition” in Paris to burn cars on New Year’s Eve.  If you ask me, though, the real threat are the people trying to sell souvenirs and roses to tourists.  It was impossible for Erin and I to have a moment of peace together without having a red rose stuck in our noses.

At midnight, a crowd of many thousands of people all waited for the fireworks to begin.  Shimmering lights lit up the Eiffel Tower at the stroke of midnight but no fireworks were to follow.  The couples all around us began asking where the fireworks were…no one seemed to know.  We waited a while longer but nothing.  I, along with most of the people there, was disappointed.  Watching the fireworks over the Eiffel Tower was one of my most looked-forward to moments of the entire trip and it didn’t even happen.

Our hostel was having a party but Erin and I were both exhausted from the flight and wanted to go to sleep.  With the American club music blasting until about 6 am, sleep didn’t come easily.  We were awoken later by the cleaning lady…it was 1 o’clock in the afternoon!  Almost our entire day was gone.  We got dressed and hit the subway to visit the Arch de Triomphe and then Notre Dame.  By then it was getting late so we grabbed a crepe and hot chocolate from a street vendor before getting back on the subway to our hostel.

Tomorrow we’ll visit the Louvre and the Catacombs.  We’re not going to visit Spain or Morocco at this point as we’d like to spend more time in Italy and Switzerland with our friends.  There will be another trip in the future and we’ll see these places then.  We’d rather enjoy ourselves than spend so much time on a train.

Au revoir!

Sunday, January 2nd

The line we saw at the Louvre the other day didn’t compare to the one we found this morning.  What might have been a couple hundred people then had been replaced by thousands of people waiting for the same thing as Erin and I…Mona Lisa.  After at least an hour waiting in line to get in, we found our way to (possibly) the most famous painting in the world.

I felt like I was at a Beatles concert!

People were pushing and straining their necks to get a view.  When I made it to the front to take a photo, the woman behind me kept pushing me, trying to get me out of her way.  I turned around and looked at her and asked sternly, “Really?”  It’s a painting.  There’s no need to push and shove to see it.  While it may be efficient for the museum operators to allow this behavior, it’s impossible to actually enjoy the painting.

After seeing the Mona Lisa, we wandered through the museum for a while before departing for the Catacombs.  It took us a while to find where we needed to be because our map was marked wrong.  After asking for directions a couple of times, we finally found it and spent another hour waiting in line.

Once we made it inside, we descended the spiral staircase into the underworld of Paris.  We followed a narrow tunnel beneath the city where 6 million skeletons have been collected and stacked into neat piles.  Row upon row of  skulls and bones lined the walls around every turn.  I began thinking about who these people were and what their lives might have been like.  Each with a unique story but now indistinguishable from the skull next to them.  I thought about what will eventually become of all of us…how each of us will one day be little more than a pile of bones.

Monday, January 3rd

We’d had hopes of getting an overnight train to Rome today.  It didn’t happen.  We knew we would need a reservation on international trains but didn’t realize we’d need to make them three or four days in advance.  We thought it’d be possible to get them the same day, so long as we showed up early enough.

Obviously, we were wrong.

After trying to find alternate cities (Milan, Pisa, Florence) without any luck, we decided to try going through Switzerland and making a couple of connections to Rome.  We were able to find one that will get us out of Paris early in the morning and into Switzerland.  From there we travel to Milan and onward to Rome.  It’s going to take all day to get there, though I think it will be nice to have a chance to see the countryside rather than riding through the night.

Lessons learned from our Eurail experience: 1) Reserve your train at least a few days in advance, and 2) just because you have a Eurail pass doesn’t mean that there aren’t costs associated with using the train.  This really took us off-guard as we paid a lot of money for the passes and weren’t expecting to have to pay any additional fees.  For an overnight train ride, you pay for sleeping quarters, which are all they offer.  A room with two beds was $150 for the two of us.  Even if we could have gotten on the train, neither of us wanted to pay the extra fee.  I’m sure there are cheaper options but in our situation, this was the only option available to us.

Think a day train would be free with a Eurail ticket?  Think again.  From Paris to Rome it cost us an additional $77.  I don’t really understand why we’re being charged these extra fees but apparently there is some fine print that we must not have read.

So after reserving our tickets to Rome for the next day, Erin and I went to the grocery store and picked up the necessary provisions to cook spaghetti back at our hostel.  After lunch we hit the subway, which (by the way) we’re getting good at using, and checked out Sacre Coeur.  We loved it!  It was touristy but not like the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre.  In a little plaza, painters were painting pictures and portraits for the tourists, some of which were quite remarkable.

From the church, you can look out over Paris and see just how huge of a city it really is.  The buildings never ended, all the way to the horizon, all I could see was development.  It says a lot of humanity and our ability to thrive in our surroundings but also says a lot about how we are destroying our planet.  With human populations growing at ever increasing rates, I wonder what cities around the world will be like in the future.  They have no option but to expand or face overpopulation.  And how will these places survive after the end of cheap oil?  Paris and other large cities operate public transit systems but these are neither large enough nor efficient enough to cope with increased use as people transition away from automobiles.  I predict a shift to a more neighborhood dependent style of living, no more commuting to work.  People will more often work from home when their jobs allow them to.

After Sacre Coeur, Erin and I walked around the neighborhood and found our way onto a street filled with sex shops, porn stores, peep shows and x-rated movie theaters.  I realized that this is probably the neighborhood where Moulin Rouge is located so we dropped into a store and found a book on Paris.  Sure enough, it was around here somewhere.

As we walked down the street, we admired the “adult toys” (dildos and vibrators for those less sensitive) in the windows of the shops.  A few blocks later I saw the big red windmill.  Moulin Rouge.  We took a few photos but really didn’t have any reason to be in this part of town, so we made our trip worthwhile by dropping into a couple sex shops before heading back to our hostel.  All in all, today was a pretty good day, even though our plans didn’t work out quite as we’d planned.