The house of Josephine (Napoleon's wife/lover?)
Versailles
Marie Antoinette's Home and Gardens (gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous this lady knew how to landscape) (also, fun fact, she installed a village on her land for the poor and often dressed like them and worked among them when she tired of being the most wealthy woman in the country)
The Latin Quarter
A medieval museum
Notre Dame (there was a choir)
The oldest church in France
Underground ruins
The site once believed to hold the thorn crown of Jesus (all stained glass)
A famous jail where Marie Antoinette and other "celebrities" lived and were sentenced to death
The Arc de Triumph (which I climbed, yet again, to the top, this time I walked the entire circumference and got a great 360 of Paris)
The "lock bridge" (a favorite)
The Champs-Élysées (where I bought a single tube of red lipstick) (and had a lemon and then a rose macaroon)
The Louvre (not a fantastic experience I must say)(it's overwhelming in the first place but on top of that we had thirty minutes because Jacob had to leave, I could have stayed longer but after sprinting through crowds and up and down stairs to find the most important relics and then finding that they were cool but not life-changing, I was kind of over it)
The Musée D'Orsee (my most favorite museum to date) (it was renovated from the old train station and holds the BEST art) (I bought a bag and a magnet)
Musée de l'Orangerie (had Monet's huge painting and a new favorite sculpture of mine, Aldolfo Wildt, unfortunately there were no pictures allowed and on top of that tight security)
Mémoire de la Shoah (a holocaust museum)(which held a room where all the ashes from the camps are buried in soil from Jerusalem and a single flame burns 24/7) (there was also an exhibition that has actual footage of the concentration camps during WWII)
Other bits and pieces
I've got to say, it's always the things you don't plan for on trips that make them worth while.
Jacob's family came to visit him and travel for a week so we met up with them on Saturday night. I'm so glad they did come, I didn't realize how much I had missed the family scene. We are a little family here, but not in the traditional sense. He has two brothers; John and Justin. We all went to eat at a Creperie and had a grand old time. From there we went to my baby: THE Eiffel Tower.
I love it so much. It's neat during the day. But it is magical at night.
Why yes, yes I am a hopeless romantic.
It's not really a feeling I can describe so I will let you all discover this for yourselves.
We ate some great sandwiches for lunch on Sunday. Next to the place we ate was a bookstore. Not any old Barnes & Noble. This place had character. There were tables set up in the street and sidewalk full of dirt cheap books. There was 90's music playing from the inside, the doors were propped open, employees were singing along. There were metal spiral stairs leading upstairs to the used and new CDs and downstairs leading to an even more cluttered collection of literature and manuals. It all had a perfectly disorganized feel, which I can relate to. Here I purchased two things. The first: a hard back pocket-sized French children's book of Noah's ark with the best illustrations. Second: a CD I grabbed last second when I decided I wanted some French music.
After experiencing the metros of Rome I have an entirely new perspective of the French transportation system- they are doing something right. Rome= complete chaos and bodies pushed up against every inch of you. Paris= a well oiled system of letting the elderly sit and the rest fill in around. I can handle the metros of Paris, I didn't feel like I was constantly being pick-pocketed.
After the second day, when Jacob had already left, Elvira and I unanimously decided to get Chinese take out to eat in bed because we were so exhausted (the last time my feet were that sore was when I was finishing my 14 hour hike ar Long's Peak).
So we basically vegged out that night. We half watched a black and white French film and I practiced reading my children's book.
The ride home was one for the books. It was like a scene from Eat. Pray. Love. Okay well I slept for about an hour because I couldn't help it. But it was just the most chill ride. We paused for dinner at a rest stop (much cleaner, much nicer, and inhabited by much more normal people than some I have experienced in the US). It's normal to eat in the car at these sorts of things. It's either illegal or simply unheard of to eat while driving. Why do two things at once? There is no rush. Life's a journey. Blah blah.
We ate in the sunset. Shoes off. Salmon sald cold. Chocolate waffle melty. That's when I pulled out the total gamble of a CD I purchased in Paris and tried it out. Yeah. It's basically the best thing ever. So Elvira and I finished our trip with great music, French countryside, and lots of laughing. I was pretty high on life.
No comments:
Post a Comment