France Day 1 and 2
Well I'm finally back! Since my France trip/experience was so long I'm going to write and post pictures about it in sections, probably by days, combining a few days that were short and / or uneventful! Like this first post! The first day was spent on a plane the second around Paris so I'm combining those photos.
My flights were nuts! It was tough leaving my kitties behind so I distracted them from the fact that I was leaving by preparing them a fancy dish of wet cat food sprinkled with crunchy cat treats and a sprig of Cat Mint :D We flew from Green Bay to Chicago where we had a 4 hour layover (ugh) and then from Chicago to Toronto. Sorry, Rissa, but Toronto is a horrible airport. They lost our bags - all four of them - and then when we tried to take the shuttle to our terminal (we landed in 3 and needed to go to 2) the staff kept giving us the wrong direction on how to get to where we needed to be. We made it on time and before we got to our next gate they had found our baggage but it was just as exciting on the way home. The plane ride from Toronto to Paris was 7 hours long. I slept through most of it but they fed me food (it was good) and I had my own TV so I could start to watch movies and then fall asleep in the middle of them.
When we finally landed in Paris we collected our bags, met up with Michelle (making our group Me, Michelle, her son Brandon, her daughter Amanda, and her mother G-ranny) and took the shuttle to the RER station to hitch a ride on public transportation into Paris. If you've never been to France, here's how the Paris public transit system works: You can take the Bus, you can take the Metro, you can take the RER (kind of like the lightrail). You can use the same ticket to ride between the Bus, Metro, and RER for two hours but not in opposing directions and you need a different ticket that's more expensive to take the RER train from the outskirts of Paris into Paris and from Paris to the outskirts of Paris. All of this I learned over the course of ten days. It took us 3 hours in the train station to figure out we needed different tickets to go from out of town into town than we needed to travel between stations in town. Plus, all the machines only take coins and no one in the whole station has any since we're all tourists just coming off the plane so we only have bills.
Anyway, we made it, and to our hotel and spent the first night getting to know the surroundings around our hotel and seeing what sights we could...like the transient woman getting into a yelling match with the crepe stand guy which ended up in her peeing on the sidewalk in the middle of everything and the old man with the suitcase standing in the middle of the road yelling "YOU GOT ALL THESE DAMN YANKS ROUND HERE I CAN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY'RE SAYING".
The next day we took a BUS tour around town to get a better lay of the land and to take some photographs of the sights and after that we decided we were going to try to go to Versailles on our own. So we get the tickets we now know we need thanks to our previous RER experience and hop on the train for Versailles. We follow along with the metro map for a little while to make sure we're going the right way and then stop paying attention.
Big Mistake. Apparently the line that runs to Versailles breaks off at the Eiffel Tower and we're supposed to switch trains and get on a different one. So we back track a few trains, hop a few turnstiles and make it to the palace about three hours from when we started and about an hour before it closes. I still got lots of cool pictures though! The French Revolution is probably my favorite period of history, certainly my favorite in French History so it was pretty neat to stand in the bedroom of Louis XVI and look out of the balcony he stood on to deal with the seething masses that had assembled in front of the castle to haul him off and chop off his head. Even more amazing was walking through Versailles and trying to picture actually LIVING there. The gardens are huge!
In the night, we took a night boat tour on the Bateaux Mouches. On the Seine, where you can see things like the Louvre and Notre Dame and pass under all of the super cool bridges, there are all sorts of little points out on the river where teenagers and young people get together to play music and hang out and drink and apparently yell out at the boat tours and moon them. Yeah...I took a video of that.
A few facts I learned about France while I was there:
1) It doesn't get dark until about 10:30 at night
2) It really does take them 2-3 hours to eat dinner (usually around 7-8)
3) They don't refrigerate eggs in the grocery store. They just sit in cartons on the shelf.
4) Starting at 10pm and every hour after that, the Eiffel Tower sparkles.
I took pictures of my cats before I left so I could look at them when I got homesick
Amanda on the plane
Michelle complains no one takes pictures of her ever since she's always the one behind the camera so I agreed to help her out
The View outside of my first hotel. I love the tall tall buildings.
The National Assembly building or summat and it's amazing topiaries!
Then we went to Notre Dame. You could really stare at that thing for whole hours and still not see everything, there are so many interesting and intricate carvings all over it, especially the front facade. It's amazing that people way back then were able to do stuff like that. It took over 200 years for Notre Dame of Paris to be built.
Notre Dame was also funny because there were two guys in front of the church selling cheap Eiffel Tower souvenirs and one was screaming at the other one calling him a thief because his competition was selling 10 towers for 1 euro and he was selling 10 for 2 euro.
The guy with his head in his hands is Saint Dennis.
The ironwork over the disturbingly huge wooden doors
Notice the ghosts I caught on film (erk :D)
The gargoyles are on the churches to help scare off evil spirits. This is the only gargoyle on the church or any church in France with a human face. They were mocking an architect when they sculpted it.
And pictures of other buildings and things I saw on the street
The police were everywhere because Paris was getting ready for the Music festival. It's to celebrate Summer and everyone can play music as loud as they want and no one can call the police on them. The police station in Paris is located in a building that used to house chickens so the French people call the police "poulet" which means 'chicken' the way we call them 'pigs' although I don't think it's as mean.
The building on the left in the back is the Conciergerie, the place where Marie Antoinette was held before being executed.
Aaah the Eiffel Tower. They paint it brown, 60 tons of brown. The brown at the bottom is lighter than the brown at the top. The paint gets darker the higher it goes on the tower to create a uniform look.
French McDonald's on the Rue de Rivoli. McDonald's in French is weird. They have Big Mac, Big Mac on weird bread, a Royal with cheese, a Royal Bacon, Filet-o-fish, a royal filet and all sorts of weird little pressed sandwiches and desserts. Their medium drinks are like a US small and their larges a US medium and nothing bigger than that! Something about the food is different, it's much better in the US.
Joan of Arc (Jeane D'arc)
I took this picture of the Eiffel Tower on the way to Versailles. We should have gotten off at the stop we paused at about twenty seconds before I took this photo
A sticker stuck to the wall of the RER train....sheep and carrots
And this is a picture of a guy that was all over billboards and the TV. Is he a celebrity or what? He's kind of scary to me. We nicknamed him "The Creeper"
Michelle on the RER
And finally, Versailles!
Louis 16th's bedroom windows and balcony
The Chapel
Wallpaper (cute)
This little guy held the curtains back away from the window.
Marie Antoinette's Bedroom
Hall of Mirrors
The Grounds
Back into town for the Bateaux Mouches tours!
I'm not sure what this monument is closed, it said Liberty Flame on it but it's located really close to where Princess Diana died so it's kind of a memorial to her now.
And the Eiffel Tower at Night
And finally, for the first two days, the weird hair stylist shop next to the hotel.
My flights were nuts! It was tough leaving my kitties behind so I distracted them from the fact that I was leaving by preparing them a fancy dish of wet cat food sprinkled with crunchy cat treats and a sprig of Cat Mint :D We flew from Green Bay to Chicago where we had a 4 hour layover (ugh) and then from Chicago to Toronto. Sorry, Rissa, but Toronto is a horrible airport. They lost our bags - all four of them - and then when we tried to take the shuttle to our terminal (we landed in 3 and needed to go to 2) the staff kept giving us the wrong direction on how to get to where we needed to be. We made it on time and before we got to our next gate they had found our baggage but it was just as exciting on the way home. The plane ride from Toronto to Paris was 7 hours long. I slept through most of it but they fed me food (it was good) and I had my own TV so I could start to watch movies and then fall asleep in the middle of them.
When we finally landed in Paris we collected our bags, met up with Michelle (making our group Me, Michelle, her son Brandon, her daughter Amanda, and her mother G-ranny) and took the shuttle to the RER station to hitch a ride on public transportation into Paris. If you've never been to France, here's how the Paris public transit system works: You can take the Bus, you can take the Metro, you can take the RER (kind of like the lightrail). You can use the same ticket to ride between the Bus, Metro, and RER for two hours but not in opposing directions and you need a different ticket that's more expensive to take the RER train from the outskirts of Paris into Paris and from Paris to the outskirts of Paris. All of this I learned over the course of ten days. It took us 3 hours in the train station to figure out we needed different tickets to go from out of town into town than we needed to travel between stations in town. Plus, all the machines only take coins and no one in the whole station has any since we're all tourists just coming off the plane so we only have bills.
Anyway, we made it, and to our hotel and spent the first night getting to know the surroundings around our hotel and seeing what sights we could...like the transient woman getting into a yelling match with the crepe stand guy which ended up in her peeing on the sidewalk in the middle of everything and the old man with the suitcase standing in the middle of the road yelling "YOU GOT ALL THESE DAMN YANKS ROUND HERE I CAN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY'RE SAYING".
The next day we took a BUS tour around town to get a better lay of the land and to take some photographs of the sights and after that we decided we were going to try to go to Versailles on our own. So we get the tickets we now know we need thanks to our previous RER experience and hop on the train for Versailles. We follow along with the metro map for a little while to make sure we're going the right way and then stop paying attention.
Big Mistake. Apparently the line that runs to Versailles breaks off at the Eiffel Tower and we're supposed to switch trains and get on a different one. So we back track a few trains, hop a few turnstiles and make it to the palace about three hours from when we started and about an hour before it closes. I still got lots of cool pictures though! The French Revolution is probably my favorite period of history, certainly my favorite in French History so it was pretty neat to stand in the bedroom of Louis XVI and look out of the balcony he stood on to deal with the seething masses that had assembled in front of the castle to haul him off and chop off his head. Even more amazing was walking through Versailles and trying to picture actually LIVING there. The gardens are huge!
In the night, we took a night boat tour on the Bateaux Mouches. On the Seine, where you can see things like the Louvre and Notre Dame and pass under all of the super cool bridges, there are all sorts of little points out on the river where teenagers and young people get together to play music and hang out and drink and apparently yell out at the boat tours and moon them. Yeah...I took a video of that.
A few facts I learned about France while I was there:
1) It doesn't get dark until about 10:30 at night
2) It really does take them 2-3 hours to eat dinner (usually around 7-8)
3) They don't refrigerate eggs in the grocery store. They just sit in cartons on the shelf.
4) Starting at 10pm and every hour after that, the Eiffel Tower sparkles.
I took pictures of my cats before I left so I could look at them when I got homesick
Amanda on the plane
Michelle complains no one takes pictures of her ever since she's always the one behind the camera so I agreed to help her out
The View outside of my first hotel. I love the tall tall buildings.
The National Assembly building or summat and it's amazing topiaries!
Then we went to Notre Dame. You could really stare at that thing for whole hours and still not see everything, there are so many interesting and intricate carvings all over it, especially the front facade. It's amazing that people way back then were able to do stuff like that. It took over 200 years for Notre Dame of Paris to be built.
Notre Dame was also funny because there were two guys in front of the church selling cheap Eiffel Tower souvenirs and one was screaming at the other one calling him a thief because his competition was selling 10 towers for 1 euro and he was selling 10 for 2 euro.
The guy with his head in his hands is Saint Dennis.
The ironwork over the disturbingly huge wooden doors
Notice the ghosts I caught on film (erk :D)
The gargoyles are on the churches to help scare off evil spirits. This is the only gargoyle on the church or any church in France with a human face. They were mocking an architect when they sculpted it.
And pictures of other buildings and things I saw on the street
The police were everywhere because Paris was getting ready for the Music festival. It's to celebrate Summer and everyone can play music as loud as they want and no one can call the police on them. The police station in Paris is located in a building that used to house chickens so the French people call the police "poulet" which means 'chicken' the way we call them 'pigs' although I don't think it's as mean.
The building on the left in the back is the Conciergerie, the place where Marie Antoinette was held before being executed.
Aaah the Eiffel Tower. They paint it brown, 60 tons of brown. The brown at the bottom is lighter than the brown at the top. The paint gets darker the higher it goes on the tower to create a uniform look.
French McDonald's on the Rue de Rivoli. McDonald's in French is weird. They have Big Mac, Big Mac on weird bread, a Royal with cheese, a Royal Bacon, Filet-o-fish, a royal filet and all sorts of weird little pressed sandwiches and desserts. Their medium drinks are like a US small and their larges a US medium and nothing bigger than that! Something about the food is different, it's much better in the US.
Joan of Arc (Jeane D'arc)
I took this picture of the Eiffel Tower on the way to Versailles. We should have gotten off at the stop we paused at about twenty seconds before I took this photo
A sticker stuck to the wall of the RER train....sheep and carrots
And this is a picture of a guy that was all over billboards and the TV. Is he a celebrity or what? He's kind of scary to me. We nicknamed him "The Creeper"
Michelle on the RER
And finally, Versailles!
Louis 16th's bedroom windows and balcony
The Chapel
Wallpaper (cute)
This little guy held the curtains back away from the window.
Marie Antoinette's Bedroom
Hall of Mirrors
The Grounds
Back into town for the Bateaux Mouches tours!
I'm not sure what this monument is closed, it said Liberty Flame on it but it's located really close to where Princess Diana died so it's kind of a memorial to her now.
And the Eiffel Tower at Night
And finally, for the first two days, the weird hair stylist shop next to the hotel.