PARIS!!!! (part 1)

Back from the "City of Light" and . . . WOW.

It was SO AMAZING.  I couldn't have asked for a better birthday trip!

I did and saw so much, but here is a very, very brief outline of what I did (and it really is brief, I promise).  Details will be further down if you want to skip them.  :)

Day 1 (May 22)
Early flight to Charles de Gaulle.  Got to my hostel by 12.  Afternoon and evening did Louvre, Tuileries, Champs-Elysées, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, and general exploring.
Day 2 (May 23)
Musée d'Orsay, Notre Dame, walked around St. Michel and St-Germain-des-Prés.
Day 3 (May 24, my birthday)
Waited in a looooong line before finally seeing the catacombs.  After that was Gare Montparnasse and Jardin du Luxembourg.  Dinner in St. Michel, wandered into a free jazz concert at the St-Germain-des-Prés church, then walked along the Seine and Île de la Cité.
Day 4 (May 25)
Sunday service at Calvary Chapel Paris!  Walked to Gare de Lyon, Gare d'Austerlitz, and Jardin des Plantes.  Also went to Place des Vosges to try visiting Victor Hugo's apartment, but it was closed for the day.  St. Louis-St. Paul church after that, then dinner and more walking in St. Michel and on the Seine.
Day 5 (May 26)
Tour of Les Égouts de Paris (the Paris sewers).  Hôtel des Invalides and Napoleon Bonaparte's tomb in Invalides church.  Gare St. Lazare, Opéra Garnier, Sacre Coeur, Gare du Nord, and Gare de l'Est.  Got back to hostel late!
Day 6 (May 27)
Pére-Lachaise cemetery, went back to Victor Hugo's apartment, Sainte-Chapelle, Sorbonne & Panthéon, dinner at La Procope restaurant!
Day 7 (May 28)
Chocolate torte at Place de la République, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, tour (in French!) of Notre Dame.  Left Gare du Nord at about 6:30 for the airport.  Got to Hamburg about 10 pm.

Okay, there you have it.

What can I say?  I did a ton of things--every day was pretty much 12 hours of seeing stuff and soaking in the atmosphere.  I splurged on food (Paris is the city of culinary delights, after all), wandered all over the city to see the places I'd read about, and just enjoyed being there.  I have dreamed for years of going to Paris, and it was hard to believe that I was really and truly there at last!  Everything went really smoothly, and it was an incredibly nice trip.  Like I said, I couldn't have asked for a better birthday!  I can't even express how amazing it was to actually be there!

Before I go into all the stories of what I did, here's something fun--

Interesting, cool, and weird stuff about Paris

• Tourists come from everywhere, but there are especially a lot of Asian tourists--at least at the main attractions like the Louvre and Notre Dame.
• The police force is awesome!  They are very active and you see them all over: patrolling on bicycles, driving past in cars or on motorcycles, standing guard in busy tourist spots.  They even have their own special motorboats made of black rubber that zoom up and down the Seine.
• In general, Parisians aren't rude to you as a tourist if you are polite to them and don't act obnoxious or do obvious tourist things like expecting food to be prepared the American way.  I tried to at least greet people in French before I used English and to just be polite and go with the flow, and I didn't have a problem at all.  Every Parisian I interacted with was at least civil, and usually very nice.
• People really do ride little motorcycles everywhere and kiss passionately in public, like you see in movies and pictures.
• There are literally thousands upon thousands of bistros, restaurants, cafés, bars, and salons de thé (tearooms) in the city.  They are on every major street and at every place (plaza) by the dozens.  Choosing where to eat can be tough!
• The classic balconied buildings with fancy tall roofs, as well as the city plan of streets branching off from the places like spokes on a wheel, were both part of the remodel by Baron Haussmann under Napoleon III in the later 1800s.
• Train stations and even airports have open pianos in them.  You can sit down and play if you want!
• There is a large black population, definitely more so than you would see in a city like Hamburg.
• Although Paris is much cleaner now than it was in the Middle Ages and French Revolution, it still has lots of rats!  You sometimes see them in rows of bushes along the street and quite often at night on the quays along the Seine.
• Parisians (and the French in general) are much more petite and tend to have darker coloration than Germans.  I didn't notice until I got back to Hamburg--almost everybody I saw on the U-Bahn going home was tall, sturdy, and blond!  This isn't true across the board, of course, but I thought it was funny.  
• Along those same lines, German bakeries are very different from French ones.  German bäckerei = thick brown bread, pretzels, danishes, and franzbrötchen (which are about as light as German pastries go).  French boulangerie = white-bread baguettes, croissants, éclairs, and tartelettes.  Both really delicious, but different, types of baking! 

So now, here's the beginning of the more detailed saga.  I could do highlights, but I think categorizing by day is easier.

Day 1: May 22, 2014

Got up very early, like 4 am, to catch my flight.  Boarded without trouble (except for, of course, the minor annoyance of airport security--it's a hassle every time!), and the flight was nice.  For a discount airline, Germanwings is pretty good: fairly spacious and clean.  The flight was short--just over an hour. I was on the aisle, so I couldn't see very well out the window, but I did get a brief glimpse of the Eiffel Tower and it was so surreal.  I couldn't believe I was actually going to BE IN PARIS.

I got through the airport, found my way onto the train, and took the airport line to the Gare du Nord.  When I got off there, it was chaos.  Multiple levels and stairways and it took a bit to find my way to the Metro line I needed, but once I finally got on the Metro it was only a few stops to the Place de la République, which was the closest stop to my hostel.

Hostel was called Auberge Jules Ferry.  As mentioned last week, I had read some really bad reviews of it and I was nervous it would be sketchy, but I was relieved to find that it was fine.  It is just shabby because it is in an old building (similar to the one I stayed at in Amsterdam, though bigger than that).  Could definitely use a facelift, and the bathrooms were super basic, but, it was pretty clean, the staff was polite, and--praise God--there were NO bedbugs!  There is only one key to each room, but they have a system that works well enough (last one out locks the door and takes the key to the front desk, first one back picks up the key and opens the door), and I just kept my valuables with me and locked my backpack shut.  Also, they had free breakfast.  So it was totally fine.  For what it was, I liked it.  (Compared to some places I've stayed on mission trips, this place was good!)

It was only about noon, so I had lots of time to see things.  Decided to get all the touristy stuff out of the way first.  Bought a croissant and then took the Metro to the city center, and inwardly was leaping and dancing with excitement when I got out onto the street and saw the Seine with Notre Dame sticking up from the Île de la Cité.  Walked along the Seine to the Louvre.  It was raining and dreary, but I didn't care because I WAS IN PARIS!!!!!  I wanted to scream, I was so excited!

Boy Strangling a Goose!  I think it's funny.

The Louvre was huger than I could have ever imagined!  I stood under an eave and ate my croissant and an apple from home, and then went in at the main entrance under the glass pyramid.  It was absolute chaos!  So many people milling around every which way.  I got in for free with my student ID and passport.  (One thing that is awesome about Paris is that if a place is educational--a museum, church, or historical site--they will very often let EU and exchange students in for free, or at least for a discount.  And if it's historical and not a major tourist attraction, any fee they do charge is pretty minimal, especially for students.  Most of the time if I had to pay, I only paid 2 to 4 euros.)

Some of the lesser-known Louvre statues are just as
beautiful as the famous ones!

Here's Mona! 

Spent about four hours in the Louvre.  It was exhausting!  So much to see, so much walking, so many people EVERYWHERE.  I saw the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo.  They were cool, but of course they are thronged by people.  Some of the other sculptures and paintings I saw were new to me, but super beautiful.  And I saw a ton of works I had studied in art history, more than I can list!  I was surprised and amused to see the sculpture called Boy Strangling a Goose from the Hellenistic period (I remembered it from Greek art class) because I had just been telling Marni about it the week before.  And I absolutely loved the rooms with all the Neoclassical and Romantic paintings--David's Coronation of Napoleon (it takes up the whole wall!), Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, and so many others.  It's absolutely surreal to see the actual real paintings in a single huge room, hanging side by side like it's no big deal.

Of course I probably saw only about one-sixth of the museum, if that, and what I saw was mostly at high speed.  The two bummers were that I didn't get to see Dürer or Vermeer because that wing of the museum is closed Thursdays (they rotate days of closure for each section to do maintenance and stuff), and though they have all of David's other famous Napoleon paintings, they don't have Napoleon Crossing the Alps (turns out that one is at the Château de Malmaison, about 7 miles outside Paris).  By the fourth hour I was ready to fall over from exhaustion (museums are tiring not only for your feet, but for your eyes and your brain!), so I headed for the exit.  I did do a quick spin through the exhibit of Napoleon III's apartments on the way out, though, and they were incredible!  (Though "apartments" is a severe understatement--most of the rooms had more square footage than any rented apartment, as we think of it, would have!)

The Louvre is HUGE.

Salon of Napoleon III's "apartment" . . . more like a palace!  #wow

Had some carrot sticks and sat down for a bit once I got outside.  Skies were clearing and there were lots of big puffy clouds.  I decided to continue my "get the touristy stuff done" mission and walked through the Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde, all the way down the Champs-Elysées (nothing more than a ridiculous ritzy shopping street!), and to the Arc de Triomphe.  The Arc was cool.  I spent a while there drawing.  A bunch of soldiers in fatigues and older men in military uniforms started showing up, and it looked like they were going to have some sort of ceremony at the commemorative WWI plaque under the Arc (it was all roped off and decorated with flowers).  But it was taking a while to start and I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower, so I ended up leaving before the ceremony happened.

Arc de Triomphe is really cool!  Such neat sculpture!

Two words to describe the Eiffel Tower: TOURIST TRAP.  The tower itself is cool, but the whole atmosphere is so ridiculous.  They have a carousel and a bunch of fair food, the lines to go up in the tower are unbelievably long, and people are taking pictures left and right.  The Champ de Mars was all roped off too--looked like some kind of an ongoing event because there were tents and stuff--so I didn't stay long.  Turns out, I never did get my own photo of the tower, but I didn't really care.  After all, it's not like the world needs another photo of the Eiffel Tower to add to the millions that already exist.

Just for the record, the tower looks better from far away than close up.  And it tends to look prettier in pictures than in real life.

And . . . Notre Dame in the light of sunset!
(Can you blame me for getting choked up?)

Was getting hungry by then and wanted a street crêpe (recommended by Cindy, the international student from Virginia who went to Paris a couple weeks ago . . . I asked for her traveler's tips on what to see and do).  I remembered seeing some between the Champs-Elysées and Tuileries, so I walked all the way back there.  Most of them were closed by then, but I found one stand that was still open.  Jambon et fromage (ham and cheese) crêpe sitting on a bench by the Grand Palais and Petit Palais (super ornate--they were built for the expositions around the turn of the century).  It was late, but of course there was still plenty of daylight.  Ah, spring and summertime in the higher latitudes of the globe!

After that I walked along the Seine all the way back to Notre Dame.  It was farther than I thought it would be!  Met an Italian guy on the way who asked me for directions to Hôtel de Ville.  I had a map, so I helped him figure out which direction it was.  We were both going to the same bridge, so we walked that far together.  He asked if I wanted to get together to do anything tomorrow, but thankfully I had the excuse that my phone wouldn't work because I am on a German data plan.  He was nice enough, but I wasn't going to agree to go anywhere with a guy whom I had known for a grand total of five minutes!

Notre Dame was so beautiful from the outside.  I confess I kind of got teary looking at it . . . another "I can't believe I'm really in Paris!" moment.

Finally went back to the hostel.  Super tired--I had done a ton of walking, a couple of miles at least!  Crashed and slept like a rock.

Two funny moments of the day: I got stuck between the turnstile and the gate in the Metro and my ticket wouldn't unlock me, so another lady had to use hers to get me out!  Also, at the Eiffel Tower two guys asked if I would take a picture of them, and when I crouched down to get the whole tower in the photo, I leaned back against the temporary wire fence that was set up at the perimeter of the grass, and it wasn't stable.  And my backpack was a bit heavy.  So the gate just gave way and I did this sort of slow-mo fall onto my back, and five or six people were like, "Oh my gosh, are you okay?"  Backside was a tad sore, but it was more funny than embarrassing!

It's late so . . . Part 2 coming tomorrow!

(P.S. Please forgive the wacko photo arrangement.  I have a very strong dislike for Blogger's photo feature--not at all user friendly.  It's like trying to paste pictures into a Word doc!)