Last Day in Paris

So we wound up the sightseeing portion of our trip with a spin through three more of Paris' landmarks today.

We started at the Musee d'Orsay, where we looked at Impressionist and Realist masterpieces from mostly 1700 on.  We saw tons of Monet, Manet, Renior, Degas, Van Gogh, and even a Dali (that dude was on some serious acid).  I won't bore you with pictures of the paintings (for reasons which I clarified during the Louvre visit), but the museum itself is an architectural masterpiece, a converted train station.

We were disappointed to learn that Whistler's Mother was not on display (the only American artist with work on display was Mary Cassatt), but I did snap off this photo of a sculpture from the 1800's that proved that even 19th century veterinarians were dumb enough to not send home an e-collar with every patient...

From there we moved on to the Eiffel Tower.  We were hoping for the weather to clear, but when we got there it was still cloudy.  The tower has three viewing decks, and it turned out the 3rd one (at the top) is closed until February anyway.  We opted for the cheap route and decided to climb the stairs... 311 to the 1st deck, another 360 to the second.  Jeana showing her stamina after about 50 steps...

But we made it up to the second deck with our lungs and legs intact, and were rewarded with a nice view of the Paris skyline.  The gold dome in the second image is Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried and his stuffed horse is displayed.  We didn't go there.

As you can see from the below image from the second deck, we barely even made it near the top... but you have to take an elevator from the second to the third deck:

We were also entertained at the bottom by Gendarmes on bikes chasing away African unlicensed souvenir vendors.  And were accosted twice by an Indian woman speaking perfect English asking us to translate something on a piece of paper for money.

Last touristy stop on the trip was Montmartre and Sacre Couer.  This is the olds artsy section of Paris that was home to immigrants during the 1800's... the Moulin Rouge is here.  We had lunch with sandwiches and pizza from a boulangerie, then rode a short tram up the hill to the beautiful church.  Sacre Coeur was built in the early 1900's as a dedication to the French who died in the Franco-Prussian wars of the 1870s.  And, it's the only church where you can't take pictures inside.  But that didn't stop them from having a gift shop inside and charging 7 euros to climb the stairs to the dome (we skipped that after the 700 steps un the Eiffel Tower in the morning).

We wound up taking the Metro back to Place de Republique, where there was a soccer shop that allowed us to round out our trip with some hard-to-find soccer jerseys for the boys (Paris St. Germain for Zach and Rennes for Peyton, because Carlos Bocanegra of the US Men's team plays for Rennes), a France scarf (obviously used by French fans to strangle themselves when Zinidine Zidane head butts Italians and costs his team a chance to win the World Cup), and a cool Olympique Lyonnais hat with the lion symbol on it.  Our boys are coming out of this trip with soccer jerseys that I feel very confident that nobody else in Duluth will have.

It has been a fun trip, but we are looking forward to getting home and settling into normal life.  At least until the we and the boys head to Disney World in 3 weeks!  But seriously, Paris is an interesting city to visit... once.  This plce is way to metropolitan for me.  There's a lot of history, but it was all generated in a very short time frame, so I get tired of seeing and hearing the same stories over and over again.  I'm not THAT big of an art lover, and frankly, I'm not impressed by cities where the women obviously consume 60-80% of the world's cosmetics supply.  It will be great to have been here once, but by far Israel was the highlight of this trip.  I'm very glad we took the chance to see the Holy Land... in this day and age, you just don't know if it will always be a safe place to visit.

Eiffel Tower shrouded in clouds

First Day in the City of Lights

And a good thing they have lights, because it was cloudy and cold all day.  But we still saw a ton; we put off the Eiffel Tower until tomorrow in the hope that the clouds might break for a bit, but it doesn't look good.

Starting off this morning, we went to the Louvre.  The earlier post shows how Steve Jobs has managed to plant an Apple store at the base of I.M. Pei's reverse pyramid.  Frankly, I'm amazed that didn't somehow end up in the background of Tom Hanks praying at the end of The Da Vinci Code.

The Louvre used to be the site of the French monarchy, so it's pretty much a huge castle.  And I mean freakin' huge.  Like "your feet hurt from walking so much" huge.  Plus it pretty much houses antiquities and Renaissance-era paintings, and to be perfectly honest, all Renaissance paintings statr to look the bloody same after 3 hours.  There's only so many times you can depict the Last Supper, or the Crucifixion, or some other biblical event.  I think the Inquisition must have taken place because artists decided to stop painting these things and the Church just decided to kill anybody who wouldn't paint for them.  But who could blame the artists?  I'd rather be tortured than paint another bible scene after doing 40 or 50, too.

I was amused by the multitude of Japanese tourists running around the museum stopping to take a photo of EVERY painting.  Seriously... just buy the book.  Plus, I'll bet the pictures in the book will turn out better.

This is Jeana trying to do her best Mona Lisa smile impersonation.  Note the Japanese tourist photographing the picture.  Bet that turned out great with the flash off, you idiot.

 

Now this is a much better use of a camera in the Louvre.  See, I'm wearing the French crown jewels.  I'm the King of France!

And, of course, the Venus de Milo.  I have to put that on there because every statue pretty much looked like every other one.  Though I did learn that this was the first to blend the curvatures of the human body when it was discovered by the Romans, and therefore influenced the next 1600 years of sculpting.  So that's important.

Next stop was on the Ile-de-la-France, an island on the Seine that houses three of the more important sites in Paris... we visited two.  First, we went to Saint Chappelle, a small cathedral that has some pretty kick-butt stained glass windows...

Saint Chapelle was the worship place for Louis IX, who was sainted by the church for bringing Jesus' crown of thorns back to France after the first conquering of Jerusalem during the Crusades.  The crown was displayed here originally, but is currently kept a Notre Dame and displayed only on Good Friday and the first Friday of every month (missed that one).  Whether or not Louis IX just made a crown of thorns on his trip and dragged an imposter back... well, we'll let the all-knowing Catholic Church explain that one.

Interesting thing happened while in line to enter the chapel.  The entrance was shared with the national office for France's Justice Department, so everybody going through the chapel had to go through a metal detector (because there's lots of important justices and such inside the walls).  Well, the lines are separate, and the line for Justice was 5 times longer.  Four Arabic guys decided they were sick of waiting and line-cut the Saint Chappelle line.  This old Parisian woman got pissed and started yelling bloody murder.  The Gendarmes manning the screening site chased them back into the Justice line, but apparently they didn't go to the end.  We got inside, and the next thing we know there's yelling outside and like 10 Gendarmes go flying out the door to kick the ass of whoever was causing problems.  Highly amusing.

From Saint Chappelle we went on to Notre Dame, where the next series of photos come from:

 

Notre Dame took 200 years to build, and probably is second only to St. Peter's in impressiveness. It's just huge, but the French have, in my opinion, hurt the impact of being inside of it by selling candles to light for prayers and having gift shops on the inside as well.

The church was designed as a tribute to Saint Denis, who was the first French religious person to convert to Catholicism and had his head lopped off by the pagans for doing so.  Supposedly, he picked up his head and dragged it to his final resting place with him.  As a reward, he is immortalized on the front of the cathedral:

He's second from the right, holding his own head.

Anyway, we also got to climb the tower and got some amazing views of the city from up there (though much of it was fogged over) and got close-ups of the gargoyles.  I iPhoned the one that is the most photographed on the building earlier.  We also found this one amusing... I think it was eating a cat:

Sorry, that's my best gargoyle impersonation.  We did get one more photo of Notre Dame by night, which is a pretty cool shot for a point-and-click, I think (we came back and had dinner by Notre Dame, so this shot is not in chronological order):

From there we headed dto the Arc de Triomphe, with the light fading on the day:

I'm not sure if the Japanese tourists to Jeana's left turned out blurry because I didn't use a flash, or because they were sprinting to the next landmark to take more photos.  We also climbed up the Arch (which finished Jeana's legs for the day), but were rewarded with an amazing view of the Champs-Elysee and also the bottom of the lit Eiffel Tower:

Our day ended with a hike down the Champ-Elysee to a Metro station, where we then caught a train back to Notre Dame for a rotisserie chicken dinner on the Seine and dessert at a crepes shop.  Pretty good.  Though I commented to Jeana that our menu would have looked something like this translated:

Escargot in a butter and garlic sauce (yes, I eat snails, I like them, deal with it)

Mushrooms over poached eggs soaked in a bacon-infused butter and wine sauce

Bread with butter and olive spread

Butter

Chicken, rotisserie, with butter coating

Sole grilled and soaked with butter, then served with a butter and egg sauce

Whipped butter

Water

Butter on the side

Crepes cooked in butter

This was a meal my mother-in-law dreams of.

Oh, I almost forgot too, the best phot of the day was this one as we walked the Champs-Elysee:

That, my friends, is the Renault store.  Why did I need that photo?  Because my first car was a 1984 Alliance, stick shift, that did great for its first 5 years, then my brother Mike dropped the engine from 5th to 2nd on the interstate while going 55 because my dad was trying to teach him how to use a stick (Dad may have told you to do it, Mike, you were still the one with the hand on the gear shift).  It went from getting 45 mpg to 30 for the rest of its very short and disastrous life.  It was in three car accidents (all with me, though I seem to recall Mike getting into one with it as well... my first one was the only one caused by the Renault driver, though... I killed a Corvette, just totaled it).  It had enough engine problems to make the Car Talk guys go silent.  The inside slowly fell apart, and was held together with duct tape in the end.  And then end... some junkyard paid me $25 to tow it away.  $25... that was what the Renault was worth at the end.  And let me say, I was VERY disappointed that Renault did not have one on the show floor on the Champs-Elysee...

Look boys, the Eiffel Tower at night!

Notre Dame's most famous gargoyle

Steve Jobs invades the Louvre

A Day in Budapest

I didn't take any iPhone photos today, so sorry about the lack of updates.  We got up early (3 AM) and caught out flight out of Tel Aviv for Budapest.  A thousand thanks for Kirstin, Frank, and Claire for being the most gracious hosts in Israel. The likelihood of us ever returning is probably slim to none, and they made this trip one worth remembering for the rest of our lives.  I'd be remiss to not thank our Jerusalem tour guide Joel as well... if any of you out there ever plan on visiting Israel, this is the guy you want showing you around.  I'm sure Kirstin would be happy to hook you up.

After arriving in Budapest, we stored out bags and headed into the city in a taxi.  I'm sorry, my knowledge of the Hapsburg Empire is extremely limited, so I pretty much am repeating what is in the guide book.

Hungary has some of the most amazing gothic buildings, created in the Age of Industrialism shortly after the Civil War, when the German Empire was at its strongest.  Don't quote me on this, but as I recall from the little I learned of 19th century Europe, the thrones of Austria, Germany, and Hungary were united through arranged marriages creating a huge territory that used Budapest as its seat of power.  The Emperor used his power to create some of Europe's largest and most ornamental government buildings, and while Budapest is cold and clammy in the winter, the buildings remain amazing sights.

Out first stop was the Castle District, which housed the Matayas Church within the grounds of a beautiful castle overlooking Pest (the city is split by the Danube River, with the west side housing the royal and executive branches of the government and being called Buda, and then Parliament and the most peasant-service buildings on the east side, being called Pest).

 

We could not enter the Church because Orthodox services were being held that morning, but you can see from the outside what a goregous church it is.  We also wandered the ramparts and turrets of the castle that overlook the Danube and Pest, and then paid for tickets to wander the catacombs beneath the castle (and get out of the cold).  Jeana got creeped out by the catacombs.  I have no pictures because they were very dark.

From there we made our way down the hill and crossed the Chain Bridge, a huge suspension bridge that allowed us over the Danube and into Pest.  After some light shopping on Vaci Utca and lunch, we made our way to the amazing Parlaiment building, which is only just over 100 years old (that's pretty young in European terms).

 

The next tour didn't start until 2 PM, so we skipped that and walked to the Basilica of St. Stephen.  The Basilica's namesake was the first of the Maygars to accept Christianity, around 1000 AD, and the pope named him king as a reward, and eventually sainted him. The Basilica was completed in 1905 after 54 years of work, and is probably the second coolest church I have been in, second only to St. Peter's and far more impressive than St. Mark's in Venice.  Then again, I did not get to visit the Dome of the Rock this week, and that one might be more impressive than St. Stephen's.

 

 

So that's St. Stephen's hand in the last photo. Last bit of interesting thing from St. Stephens... when he died, they cut off his right hand and mummified it.  Through the years it has spent time in Croatia, Vienna, and at the royal palace in Buda, but has now been restored to its natural home where you can enter a chapel to the left of the main altar and view it.  Disgusting, but interesting.

At that point we caught a taxi back to the airport, where I sit typing this before our 6 PM flight to Paris in a couple hours. 

While I have a few minutes to kill, I'd like to soapbox about, of al things, fashion...

I am very pleased to say that in the 4-5 days we have beein Europe and Israel, NOBODY is wearing those stupid &^%$ing Ugg boots or Crocs.  Those two kinds of footwear are banes of my existence.  Crocs were made for gardening, not to wear around in public.  They're stupid and dangerous.  My frickin' slippers for the house are comfortable, too, but you don't catch me wearing them to the mall.  And at the same time, it's clear either the time of Ugg boots either had passed over here or never came to fruition.  So people, just let 'em go.

However, after our trip three years ago I did not that fasion tends to start here and then work its way to the US.  Those flat Puma shoes that look like they have no sole were extremely popular in Europe when I was here three years ago.  I saw people in the States start wearing them about a year later, and I actually don't have a problem with them.

However, one fasion statement I would like to not see cross the big pond is the idiotic appearance of European and Middle Eastern women wearing jeans that had to paint on their legs (because they are so tight) and then tucking the bottoms into over-the-calf boots with 3-inche heels.  This serves no function purpose whatsoever, and does not look right when somebody is trying to navigate escalators, airports, or icy conditions.  It is not important to look like everybody else or wear "the style"; it's important to not break your ankles and cost the public another $5000 in managing your stupid foot and leg injuries because you think you need to look like that.  Please, do us all a favor and dress sensibly.

OK, that's enough of that.

Obviously, next time I write will be from Paris, so au revoir for now!

Israeli Premier League Football... it's Fan-Tastic!

Saturday night, back to Tel Aviv for a Tel Aviv derby the Israeli Premier League, Hoepel Ramat Gan FC vs. Maccabi Tel Aviv.  For those of you not familiar with European soccer (they call it football), games between teams located in the same city are called derbies and are always much more intense.

The game was played at Bloomfield Stadium in Tel Aviv, which Frank told us was built for the three Tel Aviv squads to share through a donation by an American (apparently named Bloomfield).  The orange team was Ramat Gan, and we sat with their fans.  The blue team was Maccabi.

I love attending European soccer matches.  MLS is getting so much closer to the kind of passion that fans have in these games, but you just can't beat a rocking stadium, fans jumping through the whole match (I know Cavs, Sounders fans do this, God bless them!), and people so passionately into their team that they lose complete control of their temper when something bad happens.  I'd link a few of the videos, but I have a slow upload connection here, so you'll have to be amused by the guy sitting in front of us getting wicked pissed that Ramat's star striker once again refuses to pass and gets the ball stolen. As Jeana pointed out after his third outburst (when he kicked his seat so hard it broke), it appeared either Ramat was going to lose or he was going to stranagle himself with his own team scarf.  Fortunately for him, Ramat lost first.

Later, I'll have to include the poor seat in front of us getting the crap kicked out of it.  I'll load up a few clips of the Maccabi fans as well, they were Sounder-esque (though I still think Sounder fans rule).

All you referee folks will certainly get to enjoy the clips I took of the ARs this spring!  It would seem that the Israeli FA doesn't seem to motivate their officials the same way USSF does...

Akko, Stronghold of the Crusades

So this morning we got up and drove north past Haifa to Affo, a small mostly Arab town south of the Lebanese border that is home to an ancient stronghold that was originally built by the Crusaders during the first Crusade.  The port town actually dates to the Phoenicians, but the Crusaders were the first to really build it into a regional center.

We ate lunch at the spot in the background.

 

No, I did not actually eat the fish eyeballs, but instead shared them with my best friend for lunch time, the restaurant cat which scratched my leg after finishing each fish head I threw on the floor for it:

After lunch we went inside the castle and explored it using a tape-recorded tour.  It wasn't terribly interesting, but it was a bit of a change of pace from the day before.  We decided in the morning to come here instead of the Sea of Galilee because we were pretty much Jesus-ed out from the day before.

On the left is one of the old walls of the fortified city, with the city on the right.

 

This is the citadel from ground after you enter the castle area. And yet, the coolest part of the citadel was the secret passage that had been excavated.  The Crusaders built an escape route from the main rooms of the citadel to the port, which they used when Saladin overran the city at the end of the first Crusade.  Jeana offered some perspective:

And Peyton and Zach, just for you, I made a movie of me traversing the secret passage...

Oh, and the last thing from Affo today... another subtle reminder that smoking isn't healthy (look in the mouth).  This one from the large market in the city, which, by the way, once you've seen two fresh fish markets, the smell no longer makes them that interesting...

Fried fish eyeballs for lunch in Akko

Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Wailing Wall

OK, now we really get into the fanatical Roman Catholic/Christian stuff.  Pictured above is the Stone of the Dead.  Normally, these were kept in the graveyard for Jews.  The body would be brought to the graveyard, laid on the Stone, washed, and then entombed.

However, when Jesus was crucified, the Romans were looking to humiliate any Jews being subjected to this.  So they always did crucifixion on Friday.  Bodies had to remain on the crucifix through the day, and by the time Saturday rolled around, well, that was the Sabbath so you couldn't move the body then.  Because bodies were brought to the Mount of Olives, most stayed rotting in the sun for two days... the ultimate humiliation.  Those Romans knew how to conduct psychologic warfare.

Well, it just so happened that Jesus' followers convinced the city administrators to bring the Stone of the Dead to the crucifixion site.  Etchings made by the Crusaders around 1000 AD showed the Stone in their church maps, confirming its presence.  So this Stone was where Jesus' body was laid to be washed.  While impossible to actually confirm, the evidence is fairly indisputable.  This is considered a second degree relic, meaning a saint's body has touched it.  Most visitors to the church place an object on the stone and rub its oils on the object, making it a third degree relic.  I declined to give my iPhone third degree relic status. (Odds are Steve Jobs will do that in 8 months anyway.)

From there you proceed upstairs to here:

This altar covers an opening into a bed of rocks where Jesus' crucifix stood.  Supposedly.  There were three crucifixes (if you recall from the New Testament, two criminals were crucified alongside him).  Anyway, you can crawl under the altar and touch the hole where the crucifix stood.  Yes, mom and grandma, I touched the hole.  Maybe now my left hand won't go to hell.

Next to the altar is a split rock, or cataract.  When Jesus died, supposedly the ground shook and split, and his blood spilled into the crack to baptize the skull of Adam in his blood for forgiveness for the Original Sin.  The Crusaders excavated into the area below the crucifixion, and you can follow this cataract deep into the basement of the Church.

This is the tomb of Jesus.  Originally, it was to be the Tomb of Joseph of Arithamea, but there would be no way to get Jesus' body to the Mount of Olives before sundown, so Joseph allowed his body to be entombed here.  We did not go in... you can see the line.  Besides, I didn't really feel like looking at an empty hole.

Joel did take us down below the tomb, however, to a small tomb off the main level.  Five tombs were in this hole in the side of the room (where the people are standing in front of), and when excavated they found the name "Joseph of Arithamea" inscribed over one... fairly convincing evidence that most of the story fits.

Now, for anybody out there hurt by blasphemy, skip these next few paragraphs.  According to Joel, Joseph was a pretty rich guy.  And while a Roman guard was placed to guard the tomb, back in those days a guard could be convinced to "see nothing" for a few hours.  So when on the third day Jesus rose and Mary and Mary Magdalen found the tomb empty and proclaimed he had risen from the dead... well, it could just be that Joseph had a few slaves come and move Jesus over to the Mount of Olives under darkness.  According to Joel, the Israeli archeologists had found exactly that, and claimed to have found the actual tomb of Jesus.  Alas, we did not have time to see it today.  So believe whatever you want.

One of our last stops in the Church was here, in this grotto deep below everything.  It was here that Helena, mother of Constantine, who convinced him to convert to Christianity, in her trip to find the site of Jesus' crucifixion and build her church there (what became the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), found three crucifixes and was convinced she had the right site.  Mind you, this was 300 years later, and odds are that the Romans had probably started using new crucifixes over that time (rather than 300 year-old ones).  But hey, it is what it is.

Last point of note from the Church... these wooden boards dot the floors of the Church.  They are tombs of Templar Knights, who believed the only way they could be forgiven for the sins they committed during the Crusades was to be buried in the Holy Church and have others stomp on their bones regularly.  Nice.

Two final pics from today... the first of which I apologize for the blurriness:

I snuck this shot above the teeming masses at the Wailing Wall.  A Jewish holiday weekend started today, Rosh Chodesh Shevat, so pictures were not allowed at the Wall (on the far side of the image).  To avoid being accosted, I shot this behind my back with no flash, so it turned out pretty crappy.  You'l have to take my word for how amazing it was.  Thousands of Jews waiting to pray at the wall.

The wall is the western border of the temple built by King Herod.  The original Jewish temple stood where the Dome of the Rock now stands; it houses the rock that Abraham was challenged by God to sacrifice his son, because Gabriel appeared and offered a ram in Isaac's place.  The Muslims control the Temple Mount, so this wall is as close as the Hebrews can get to their most holy place.  Yeah, I can't imagine why they don't like each other either.

Thousands of Jews pray at this wall every year.  And, as Joel noted, all it will take is one day for some Muslims at the top to start firing stones over the wall and all hell will break loose.  Wonderful.

This is the Dome of the Rock by night.  You can see the Dome on the left... according to the Muslims, Mohammed flew a winged horse to this site and then ascended into heaven on a golden ladder sent down by Allah, after receiving words of wisdom from the prophet Moses and Abraham himself.  The Jews think this is all hogwash and believe Islam has incorporated this story into their beliefs for no reason other than to make a declaration of rights to Judiasm's most holy site.  Again, we wonder why they don't get along.

The ruins directly in front of us are a series of temples built by the Monophysite empire.  This was a brief time in Jerusalem's history that apparently is uninteresting to most because it does not involve any modern religions.  Alas, I didn't get more information.

Whew.  That's all for today... I have to get to bed.  I don't even know where we are going tomorrow yet, but obviously I'll have tons of pictures when we get there!