Paris

We took a train from Frankfurt to Paris. We missed our scheduled one of course, but a helpful customer service guy rerouted us through a different city. The train ride wasn't much as far as scenery, so we entertained ourselves by playing chess on my Macbook and then taking a series of terrible photos using Photo Booth. You can enjoy those on my Flickr site (see the link in the upper right). I've been uploading lots of short video clips to YouTube as well - mostly panoramic shots of various places.

The French have been described as rude and particularly unfriendly towards people who don't speak their language. This is a fairly old stereotype I believe. In our experience so far, it's completely wrong. Everyone we have met has been friendly and helpful - even ridiculously helpful. In one case, we asked the receptionist at our hotel if he had a corkscrew. He spent a few minutes searching, got up from his desk, went to the bar, came back, made a phone call, continued looking through his desk while talking on the phone, and then hung up and informed me that he was sorry, he didn't have one, but his associate at a nearby hotel did! So, I thanked him and walked over to the other hotel down the street to open a 3 euro bottle of wine. Awesome.

The traffic here is surprisingly light - not that many cars on the roads. The weather has been hit or miss - drizzly and cloudy with occasional sun. We have walked and walked and walked all over this city. Crashing out at the hotel by 6pm local time has been the norm the last few days.

Today we caught the Eiffel Tower during some sunshine. It was amazing! It was also more stairs than anywhere else previously on this trip, but the weather was cool (even cold near the top) so it wasn't bad. The tower itself is a fantastic sight to behold. To think that it was built only as a monument - it serves no real purpose - is amazing. The Statue of Liberty that they gave us is nothing compared to what they've built for themselves.

We checked out The Louvre today. I say "checked out", because we were only there for an hour or two. We got there just before closing and we we're kind of museumed out anyway, so we just checked out the sculpture section and a lot of the renaissance art. It was interesting and I wish we could have stayed longer, but our energy levels were dwindling... The Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo were swarmed with tourists. Honestly, there were many far greater works of art to be seen. Those two just have names that people recognize, so they go straight to them and ignore everything else... I personally liked Giuseppe Arcimboldi/Arcimboldo's work.