Ou est la baguette?

So as Jen said we went to CERN the particle accelerator which will open a worm hole into the future or a black hole or perhaps find the Higgs Boson, the particle GOD rides on. It was pretty awesome from a nerd point of view, we got to see the where the particle for the accelerator starts, the machine looked pretty futuristic and the rooms all had radiation warnings and such. Also because the accelerators have built up over 40 years of testing some of the areas are like walking into the past or like a Dharma Initiative Lab, all awesome curved Bakelite surfaces and chairs. So anyway the tour was pretty rad, and gave lots of science background. So now in the last instants as the Earth is pulled into the CERN created black hole we will be able to say we saw the machine that did this :)

So back on story, Jen and I travelled from Nice to Paris by train. Which was a pleasant enough trip didn't have the nice mountainous views of the alps though.

We arrived at Paris at about 4, so we had some time to comfortably get to our hotel before it got dark. We had to take a couple of subways, which wasn't too bad. At the train station we bought 2 ten trip subway passes. Which actually just pumps out 10 individual trip tickets. LOL so the machine pumped out 20 of these little tickets which Jen collected up and held in a big stack. Our hotel was south Paris but still within the big ring road. The weather was good so dragging our cases the couple of blocks from the subway to the hotel wasn't too bad.

The hotel concierge was pretty intense, he put on a comedy act for us, about 20 mins in we were ready to run. But eventually we got away and went up the tiny elevator to our room, which was quite awesome and came with little cookies and coffee in the room. Plus a TV that showed CNN and a toilet that was very small, so small you had to sit sideways on it.

So that night we went out to a nearby restaurant and had some nice food which I've forgotten about, plus milkshakes I think...

The next day we headed out into Paris, on the way to the sub station we picked up some pain au chocolat, various fruits and a baguette. We headed to the Eiffel tower, we got our first peeks of it on the train.

The Eiffel tower is pretty awesome. It looks like scaffolding and girders but it is so iconic and in such a beautiful place. On our approach we came through a nice garden, which of course has some dodgy guys trying to sell Eiffel tower miniatures. But also has a really nice little duck pond which at that time (spring) had a bunch of cute ducklings. So after watching the ducklings do cute duckling things for a while we went to the tower. The lines below it were quite large, the shortest line was the one for the stairs, which we intended to take anyway. So we walked our way up the tower, all 600 steps. It was a little crowed up top but the views were amazing.

After walking our selves back down we decided to go for a stroll up the seine (as if our legs needed the work out) It was pleasant enough, but on the way we saw this lady who found a “gold” ring on the ground right beside us, this was somewhat remarkable, but by now both Jen and I are pretty jaded to people trying to give us stuff. This lady decided we should have the ring because we watched her find it? We said no maybe you should take it to the police someone is looking for it, but she really wanted us to have it. Anyway we walked on, absolutely sure we had dodged some sort of scheme, but not sure for the scheme was supposed to work. So we stopped and watched her, and sure enough she found the ring beside the next couple to walk along, they for some reason reached into their wallets and gave the lady cash. Weird.

Speaking of which the current craze in Paris seems to be giving people a note to read that says how bad your life is and that you should give them money. There were heaps of girls like this. Also on the metro we had people giving spiels and asking for money, these spiels were in French so we didn’t understand, but they must have been pretty convincing because one guy who did it was enormously fat and another was a women with a nice looking handbag and decent make up, they didn’t look like they were doing too bad. But anyway back the beautiful stuff in Paris. We spent all the rest of that day just walking along the river. We saw Notre Dame, didn’t go in just looked from the outside. Nice. Just in front of it is the centre of Paris where they measure the distance to all other areas from. We saw a cute old couple kiss on it so decided to do the same. Later on we stopped for a toilet break at a McDonalds and half an hour of walking back along the river later, Jen realised she didn’t have her ring, which made me realise I didn’t have our bag. Opps. So we jogged back, luckily my bag was there, unluckily Jen’s ring was not. So a little dispirited we went and got some dinner. I can’t quite remember what we had, I’ll scan the photos and figure it out but I think Jen had foie gras with sweet wine, which was pretty awesome. (Jen says – we had foie gras and salad, and then steak and lamb chops, and it was SO GOOD)

The next day we headed out again stocked with pain au chocolat and fruits. This time we planned on doing the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées down to the Louvre which was open late that night. But it was windy and raining pretty hard. We still did what we planned but it was perhaps a little less pleasant than a stroll in Paris could be. We paid the money and got to go up the arc museum and the chance to stand on top of it. Which was nice, good views but the rain was coming in sideways and our umbrellas were failing. So after that we went to the McDonalds on Champs, McDonalds is our refuge when we need to pee or want a familiar atmosphere. We sat with hot chocolates and watched tourists getting soaked. The Champs is not as pretty and elegant as I had heard, I think the big chain shops and fast foods have swept in and stolen its charm.

After our drinks we did a little shopping, I got some jeans that I desperately needed, the holes in my old ones were starting to attract attention. We strolled the rest of the way down the Champs to the Place de la Concorde, which is a nice open space with a big plinth and some nice fountain statues. So we were able to enjoy that and the park in front of the Louvre, can’t remember what it’s called, but it too was nice, if a bit damp from the wet (it had stopped raining). At the Louvre we decided to focus on a couple of wings, I can’t even remember which, the whole museum was a blur of statues and paintings. We did see the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. I wasn’t greatly impressed, I feel we have seen more impressive statues in Rome pulled out of the ash near Pompeii and more impressive paintings. But I guess we have just seen too many museums of late, we’ve become desensitized to the beauty.

That night for diner we had all the French stuff we had meant to have so far, frog's legs and snails. They’re not bad, snails are like scallops and frogs legs and like tiny chicken wings, with hips and spines attached.

The next day was beautiful, which was good because we were going to a graveyard. We got to Père Lachaise Cemetery pretty early, but the sun was already in full force. This graveyard is the largest and most famous in Paris, mostly because of Jim Morrison’s grave. He died of an overdose in Paris, and the French law states that if you die there you can get buried there. Morrison’s grave is just a plain normal looking grave, but it has graffiti and crud that people have left to him all over it. Plus it is behind someone else’s much larger and more impressive tomb which is also covered in Morrison graffiti. We wandered the graveyard pretty idly, found a few cats, found a grave for someone called SexToy, which surprisingly was a pretty normal grave otherwise. Saw Chopin’s grave on the composers row, saw Oscar Wilde's tomb, which is of an angel in full flight sideways and looks a bit art deco. Also for some reason people have taken to kissing it and leaving big lipstick marks. We found some other graves that were quite cool, one had a bronze of the person climbing out of there tomb, a few had the person bronzed lying atop the grave sleeping. So it was quite a hot and macabre morning.

After that we took the metro to Montemarte, and the Sacre Couer. It was also very nice. At the base of the hill we got some fruit, a baguette and some pate, which was very authentic but looked a little too much like jelly meat. And we ate them on the hill in the sun. After getting a little burnt we went inside the church, a very impressive space, but it felt a little wrong compared to some of the roman churches we went too. This church had masses of tourists walking through flashing their cameras. There was a few people telling them to take off hats and be quite but they only had a moderate effect.

After admiring some choice views of Paris we moved on to the artist district which was filled with people doing portraits. We got some crepes and just hung out in the sun a little. Then made our way down the hill, we visited the graveyard at the bottom of the hill which was a pleasant respite from the tourists and had quite a number of cats, not nearly as impressive as Père Lachaise though.

Our last day of Paris we only had a half day before we had to make our way to the airport. So we decided to take a boat cruise around the Seine and stop at the Pompidou centre along the way. We got there and observed its inside-out buildingness which is nice, but we saw that the queue to get in was massive and we didn’t have the time to wait. Ah well. Outside the Pompidou is a big open space that the queue snakes through, but sitting in an area of her own was a small gypsy woman and some sort of culturally significant instrument that I’m sure she was playing beautifully, but the effect was a horrible whining, much like the sound in a horror movie when someone is killed, but played out continuously. But to alleviate this torture for the waiting line a violinist (her instrument seemed much like a bad violin) who was very skilled played. So her whining almost worked as background sound to it. We were pretty happy to leave and get some lunch before getting back on the boat to cruise up the river. Our boat was one of the Batobus water buses which do a circuit on the Seine from the Eiffel tower up past Notre Dame and back. It was pretty cheap for the amount of entertainment you get, and you can jump off and on all day.

In the afternoon we took the train to the airport, took about an hour I think. Along the way we got to see a woman faint, which was quite exciting. Once we got to the airport we found out that none of the escalators were working. But we are quite practiced in carrying our 23kg suitcases up and down stairs, so it wasn’t too much hassle. The rest of the airport was a little confusing to navigate but I think that was mostly because they were doing renovations in our area. We got on the plane, tired but happy. Our Continental European tour was over. Goodbye Paris.