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...