Friday, March 8th-Monday, March 11th 2002
We arrived in Paris on the Eurostar (the train through the Chunnel) late on Friday, at about midnight and went straight to our hotel.
We got up on Saturday and went to the Tourism office, because we wanted to get a museum pass (you paid 27 euros, and got into 70 museums free, and didn’t have to wait in line!). We also bought a French-English dictionary, because we didn’t have time to buy one before we left. We didn’t use it much, but it was reassuring to have. My proudest accomplishment was ordering a fish sandwich plain at McDonald’s with it. After we bought the pass, we decided that since the Tourist office was less than a block away from the Arc de Triomphe, we would go up in that. It had a really nice view, and if you took the picture just right, you could get a picture of a person standing “in front” of the Eiffel Tower. My friend Rachel, the girl I went with, and I, had some lady take our picture, so we’ll see how it turns out. Then we went to the Eiffel Tower. We basically just stood in line for three hours. It was insane. You had to wait a half hour outside the Tower, and then another 15 minutes to board a little elevator that took you about a third of the way up. Once you got to that floor, you had to wait in line for another half-hour, to take the same little elevator to the top. Then you looked around on top, and waited in line once again to take the elevator to the third floor. By this point, we were sick of waiting in line, so we walked the rest of the way down to the bottom. It was the longest flight of stairs I think I’ve ever walked down) The top was kind of disappointing, because the top level had a grating all the way around it, so you couldn’t take any pictures without it appearing in them. There was another level right underneath that, which was screened in by a glass window, and that was nice, because they had a picture of what was out of the window below the window, with important buildings labeled, so you could figure out what you were looking at. After that, we were going to go to Versailles, but it was a lot later than we had expected, so we decided to wait until Sunday to go.
Instead, after lunch, which consisted of some crackers and an apple that I bought at a little store because I was too cheap (and too poor) to get anything more, we went to some art museums. We went to the Musée d’Orsay, so I could see Monet. I went into the museum liking Monet, and left loving him. I saw a few dozen pictures, and liked all of them. My favorites were some winter ones, and one with a bunch of French flags, that I bought a postcard of. See the Picture I also bought a postcard of this one, because it’s so famous, and I like it too. See the Other Picture After seeing that museum, we had just enough time to pop into the Louvre, and see the Mona Lisa. It took us forever to get to it because the museum is so large, so we didn’t get to see anything else except for the paintings on the way to it. I was happy to see one painting that I recognized, though. It’s a portrait of Castiglione (who wrote The Book of the Courtier) by Raphael, which is on the cover of the copy of The Book of the Courtier published by Penguin. Then we had to leave, because the Louvre was closing. We went to a shopping center that was located under the Louvre, because we wanted to go to some French shops, but there wasn’t anything too exciting, so we headed back to our hotel. It was only about 7, but we were tired, and hadn’t eaten dinner yet. We bought dinner at a little supermarket near our hotel. We were limited as to what we could buy, since we didn’t have any cooking facilities, so we ended up with some peach yogurt (which was great), some fruit, some pretzels, and some vanilla wafers.
On Sunday, we wanted to get to Notre Dame early, so we could attend service, but were waylaid on the way by some souvenir shops. We figured that we had to buy souvenirs at some point, so we stopped and bought a few things. I only bought some socks, some postcards, and a key-chain of the Eiffel Tower. We got to Notre Dame, and stood in line for a while (we had to stand in line because they didn’t let people with the pass we had bought go to the head of the line, like every place else we went). We finally got inside, and climbed some stairs to the top. It was another nice view, and the architecture was amazing. I took way more pictures than I had planned. When we climbed down, we went inside the church itself, where they were holding Mass. What we hadn’t realized that the Mass would be in a foreign language. There were tons of people there, but I’m sure most of them spoke French (or at least more than 6 words). It was kind of strange, because they had all the chairs in the middle of the church, and then tourists could walk around the edges of the chairs. It was weird to be walking around as a tourist in the middle of a church service. It was the only time we had, though, so we just walked quietly.
After that, we walked to another chapel nearby, the Sainte Chapelle, which is the chapel for the Palais de Justice, which we didn’t have time to see. It's just a pretty little chapel, but it’s famous because there are over a thousand scenes from the Bible, in chronological order, on its stain-glass windows.
Then we got lunch at a café (once again, I was cheap, and bought some yogurt and some chips) and walked back near Notre Dame, to sit on a bench and eat. Sitting near Notre Dame is sad/annoying, because there are a lot of beggars around. They were mostly mothers with children, and they would come up to you speaking in French, and wouldn’t go away until you gave them money or food. I think helping the poor is good, but since we saw one of the beggars smoking, that kind of made us wonder whether they really needed to be begging.
After that, we took the train to Versailles, which was amazing. It was huge. I don’t know of many other things that are that large, and that impressive. We went into part of the inside, and it was incredibly lavish. I took a picture of the fireplace, because it had logs in it that were as big as I was! The ceilings were all painted with pictures, and everything was elaborate. According to someone Rachel overheard, the palace took 40 thousand people 25 years to build, which is amazing to think about. We walked around the grounds of Versailles for a while. They were enormous and amazing. We eventually left and took the train back to Paris. We tried to find the Bibliothheque Nationale de France, which is France’s version of the Bodleian, but it was closed, so I took a picture in front of it. Then we ate dinner at McDonalds, went back to our hotel, and went to bed.
On Monday, we went to Disneyland Paris, since Rachel really wanted to go there. It was OK, but it wasn’t really one of the highlights of the trip. Monday afternoon, we got back on the Eurostar and headed back to London.
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