Je ne peux pas te jetter, la fourchette!
This one may be short, since I'm sitting on the public computer here in the hostel. We are officially on Battery Rationing, until I get to London tomorrow and buy a power adapter. (The secret justification here is my secret plan to secretly go to grad school in the UK somewhere. Yes.)
So, originally I was going to have to censor this for the benefit of my mother, who didn't want me to go to the Eiffel Tower for fear that I'd be terrorism'd. But! Since today was kind of a crapshoot, I don't have to worry about that.
No pictures today, unfortunately, due to the battery situation. They'll go up soon enough.
So! I actually managed to sleep in until 9 this morning, which was rather nice. Except it was raining when I woke up. And this could have been A Sign. Because I had this slight feeling of foreboding that my loose plans for today suffered a fatal flaw. And they did. I got downstairs, narrowly managed to catch breakfast, and checked to see when the Catacombs were open. Turns out they're closed on Mondays. So, that part of the adventure has been bumped to Friday (my "whatever I forgot to do" day). And so, suddenly, my day became very... unplanned. I decided I'd do the obvious things instead, and hopped a train to the Eiffel Tower nowhere in particular that anyone would be afraid of me going. I got there, took a look around, looked up a lot... and the tower was covered mostly in mesh netting near the bottom, so I had this weird feeling that I was looking up the tower's skirts. I glanced at the lines, and decided that if I was going to climb the tower, I'd have to take the stairs. Cheaper, and almost no line. So! I walked over to security, and the man, unlike every other security person in the history of the universe, took both hands and dug through my bag. And here he discovered that I've unwittingly been travelling with an international menace.
You may recall my travelling companion from its last encounter with security, at the Cook County courthouse. These days she is going by La Fourchette, and she travels with her accomplice Bontrager Multi-Use Tool.
This is the only point during my trip that I was grateful that my French is crap. Because the man in front of me, weilding my fork and my bike wrench and insisting that I needed to throw them in the trash, did not need to hear my sarcastic response about how I couldn't throw away my tools, and how the airport hadn't managed to have any trouble with it. And there's no way they didn't know about the fork. They used a freaking x-ray. After I stared at him for a while, kind of perplexed, and he kept saying "interdict, interdcit" and then pointed to my bike tool and said "that's a knife" I kind of gave him a cock-eyed look and replied "non" and (possibly much to his horror), I proceeded to open it up and show him the allen wrenches and screwdrivers that make up its entirety. This did not satisfy him, and he took it back from me, stabbed himself in the wrist... with an allen wrench, and said "Dans la poubelle!" I took it back, along with La Fourchette, and left.
I simply cannot consider this a defeat. But I don't think I'll return to La Tour Eiffel again, even without my criminal tools, because there's no beating that experience.
Obviously this left me with even less to do. In the end, I decided I was going to walk up to L'Arc de Triomphe, which I'd originally planned to skip. It was predictably... itself. And then I walked down the Champs Elysees. And that... that is very completely not like anything else in Paris. Staying down in the 13th arr. and generally only wandering around rive gauche, I'd gotten used to tiny streets. Champs Elysees is huge. Huge, huge. Probably a good part of a Chicago city block from facade to facade across the street. And full of stores. None that interested me, but it was still neat to see. And so I walked, and walked some more, with the vague intention of going to Les Invalides and then spending the rest of the day at a museum or something.
And, once I got to Place de la Concorde, it started raining and I was buggered if I was going to walk all the way over to Invalides in the rain. So, instead I walked over to Tuileries again and had lunch under a tree, and decided if I was going to rain on me and everything else in Paris was going to try to prevent me from doing what I wanted, I would just go to the Louvre. (My vacation is just so tough guys. What an awful day, it rained and a man tried to throw my fork away, so I went to the Louvre instead.)
And the Louvre... the Louvre. Wow. It is absolutely huge. I wasn't going to go, because I knew it was going to take me two days to get through it, and it's true. I got there around noon and I didn't leave until 6, and I only got through two of the three wings. Paintings, sculpture, mummies, entire ancient walls. I lost interest in the paintings pretty quickly (I saw the important ones), but there was a tiny temporary exhibit on drawings that was awesome, and even had a William Blake on display. And then there were all the sculptures (the Greek section in particular got "Hall of Heads" inextricably stuck in my brain), and the random bits and pieces of cultural... whatsit. Very, very cool.
Then there was some more walking, to get me back to my hostel. I stopped for dinner in a proper cafe, successfully ordered a croque madame (which I didn't know how to eat... I ate half of it with a fork, and half of it with my hands, figuring I'd at least even out my chances). The waiter didn't even have to switch to English for me until the check. (Mostly because all I needed to say was "croque madame" and "merci".) Then I braved a bakery and ordered an eclaire, which was... it was an eclaire in Paris. So yeah. (It made me want to go to pastry school omg if I could create things that tasted like that...)
So... lessons learned today: It is time to remember to put the fork and other tools in the checked baggage and leave it there.
So, I think today was the first day I spent completly conscious and mostly not jet-lagged. And of course I have to leave for London tomorrow. It's great timing, because I'm almost done with my list of Big Things to Do in Paris, but at the same time... I'm just starting to get comfortable here and this city is amazing, and I know once I get back I'm really only going to have one more day to do things, and that's sad. Oh man. (I guess this wasn't that short after all.)
So, originally I was going to have to censor this for the benefit of my mother, who didn't want me to go to the Eiffel Tower for fear that I'd be terrorism'd. But! Since today was kind of a crapshoot, I don't have to worry about that.
No pictures today, unfortunately, due to the battery situation. They'll go up soon enough.
So! I actually managed to sleep in until 9 this morning, which was rather nice. Except it was raining when I woke up. And this could have been A Sign. Because I had this slight feeling of foreboding that my loose plans for today suffered a fatal flaw. And they did. I got downstairs, narrowly managed to catch breakfast, and checked to see when the Catacombs were open. Turns out they're closed on Mondays. So, that part of the adventure has been bumped to Friday (my "whatever I forgot to do" day). And so, suddenly, my day became very... unplanned. I decided I'd do the obvious things instead, and hopped a train to the Eiffel Tower nowhere in particular that anyone would be afraid of me going. I got there, took a look around, looked up a lot... and the tower was covered mostly in mesh netting near the bottom, so I had this weird feeling that I was looking up the tower's skirts. I glanced at the lines, and decided that if I was going to climb the tower, I'd have to take the stairs. Cheaper, and almost no line. So! I walked over to security, and the man, unlike every other security person in the history of the universe, took both hands and dug through my bag. And here he discovered that I've unwittingly been travelling with an international menace.
You may recall my travelling companion from its last encounter with security, at the Cook County courthouse. These days she is going by La Fourchette, and she travels with her accomplice Bontrager Multi-Use Tool.
This is the only point during my trip that I was grateful that my French is crap. Because the man in front of me, weilding my fork and my bike wrench and insisting that I needed to throw them in the trash, did not need to hear my sarcastic response about how I couldn't throw away my tools, and how the airport hadn't managed to have any trouble with it. And there's no way they didn't know about the fork. They used a freaking x-ray. After I stared at him for a while, kind of perplexed, and he kept saying "interdict, interdcit" and then pointed to my bike tool and said "that's a knife" I kind of gave him a cock-eyed look and replied "non" and (possibly much to his horror), I proceeded to open it up and show him the allen wrenches and screwdrivers that make up its entirety. This did not satisfy him, and he took it back from me, stabbed himself in the wrist... with an allen wrench, and said "Dans la poubelle!" I took it back, along with La Fourchette, and left.
I simply cannot consider this a defeat. But I don't think I'll return to La Tour Eiffel again, even without my criminal tools, because there's no beating that experience.
Obviously this left me with even less to do. In the end, I decided I was going to walk up to L'Arc de Triomphe, which I'd originally planned to skip. It was predictably... itself. And then I walked down the Champs Elysees. And that... that is very completely not like anything else in Paris. Staying down in the 13th arr. and generally only wandering around rive gauche, I'd gotten used to tiny streets. Champs Elysees is huge. Huge, huge. Probably a good part of a Chicago city block from facade to facade across the street. And full of stores. None that interested me, but it was still neat to see. And so I walked, and walked some more, with the vague intention of going to Les Invalides and then spending the rest of the day at a museum or something.
And, once I got to Place de la Concorde, it started raining and I was buggered if I was going to walk all the way over to Invalides in the rain. So, instead I walked over to Tuileries again and had lunch under a tree, and decided if I was going to rain on me and everything else in Paris was going to try to prevent me from doing what I wanted, I would just go to the Louvre. (My vacation is just so tough guys. What an awful day, it rained and a man tried to throw my fork away, so I went to the Louvre instead.)
And the Louvre... the Louvre. Wow. It is absolutely huge. I wasn't going to go, because I knew it was going to take me two days to get through it, and it's true. I got there around noon and I didn't leave until 6, and I only got through two of the three wings. Paintings, sculpture, mummies, entire ancient walls. I lost interest in the paintings pretty quickly (I saw the important ones), but there was a tiny temporary exhibit on drawings that was awesome, and even had a William Blake on display. And then there were all the sculptures (the Greek section in particular got "Hall of Heads" inextricably stuck in my brain), and the random bits and pieces of cultural... whatsit. Very, very cool.
Then there was some more walking, to get me back to my hostel. I stopped for dinner in a proper cafe, successfully ordered a croque madame (which I didn't know how to eat... I ate half of it with a fork, and half of it with my hands, figuring I'd at least even out my chances). The waiter didn't even have to switch to English for me until the check. (Mostly because all I needed to say was "croque madame" and "merci".) Then I braved a bakery and ordered an eclaire, which was... it was an eclaire in Paris. So yeah. (It made me want to go to pastry school omg if I could create things that tasted like that...)
So... lessons learned today: It is time to remember to put the fork and other tools in the checked baggage and leave it there.
So, I think today was the first day I spent completly conscious and mostly not jet-lagged. And of course I have to leave for London tomorrow. It's great timing, because I'm almost done with my list of Big Things to Do in Paris, but at the same time... I'm just starting to get comfortable here and this city is amazing, and I know once I get back I'm really only going to have one more day to do things, and that's sad. Oh man. (I guess this wasn't that short after all.)