PARIS!!!

Paris. We think Paris was our favorite. It was great. We got to stay for free at a friend's flat in the Latin Quarter. It was so nice not to be in a Hostel. We were so hosteled out by the end of our trip. We relaxed a lot when we were there- waking up late and retiring early. Our first stop was Notre Dame. It really was beautiful. Pretty magnificent inside. There was a mass going on inside, that was kinda weird. I always think the cathedrals are really beautiful but sometimes they could be kind of creepy.

We quickly discovered that Paris was FULL of beautiful walks. Walkways lined with trees everywhere! They were always beautiful, but they always went on FOREVER!!!! Whatever you were walking to you would always think, "We're almost there" but we never were.

Every tree in Paris was perfectly aligned.

Arc de Triomphe. It was HUGE!!! We walked FOREVER to it! It took well over an hour, I want to say hours. You could see it from so far away, it looked so much closer.

Up inside the arch their was all these intricate carvings. It was beautiful. I guess whenever the french had a victory their armies would march through this arch.

Our first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.

The Sewer Tour. We went underground through the real sewer. There was a sign that said don't touch ANYTHING and wash your hands before you leave.

In Les Misrables there is this incredible scene that takes place in the sewers of Paris and Greg kept thinking about it and then they had a picture about it. I guess Victor Hugo (who wrote Les Misrables) was friends with the guy who mapped the sewers and learned all about them before he wrote the scene. I thought he actually went down in there with him, but Greg said he didn't.

So we were literally walking above the water the entire time. At first I was thinking, "Is this really the real sewer?" But later we saw definite evidence. Yes we saw plenty of POOP FLOATING IN THE WATER!!! It was so disgusting!!!

This is some giant ball they send through to clean it out somehow.

The Eiffel Tower!

Another great shot taken by someone else. Who doesn't want a picture of the Eiffel Tower with the top cut off?

Finally, someone figured it out.

Down the stairs to the Catacombs. They just spiraled down down down, for a long time underground.

Then on through the never ending tunnels. We walked forever down these long dark damp tunnels.

It was very Indiana Jones-ish.

And then- OH MY GOSH!!!!! I immediately covered my mouth in fright and it took minutes to relax.

So during the plagues so many people were dying they ran out of burial space so they dug up old graves and brought all the bones down in these tunnels. It went on FOREVER!!!

When Greg took this picture I slipped and accidentally touched the bones! Ew!

Can you believe these are real? I couldn't believe it. We weren't supposed to touch anything, obviously, but I saw with my own eyes some man pick up a skull with his own hands and move it around. How disrespectful. And gross.

The Rodin Garden. This was the best deal. It was only 1 euro to get in. Wow, Rodin is intense. All his statues looked so pained. Their faces so sorrowful. This is me being The Thinker.

The Gates of Hell. Greg loves this one. Once we looked at this we realized the whole collection in the garden was in the doors- meaning they were all damned souls. It explained a lot. It was so sad though. You could see people in the doors trying to escape. So much detail. I don't know how people make things like this. People truly have genius.

Napoleon's tomb. We didn't go inside. The dome is plated in real gold- pretty impressive.

The gardens were beautiful. The french shape all there trees into cones. Different, but pretty in some ways. It makes their gardens very "perfect". The only place that wasn't that way was Marie Antoinette's Chateau.

The Eiffel Tower at night was very beautiful. It was cold! There were couples everywhere in the daytime, kissing and laying in the grass, and at night time these huge groups of kids would get together with wine and cheese and bread. I guess that's really normal for the french to just gather at night and have picnics together.

It was BLUE!!! I couldn't believe how VIVID it was! On the other side there were stars in a circle on it so it looked like the EU Flag. On the hour it SPARKLED!!! That was the best part. It was so glittery! It was so beautiful!

The Louvre!!! The Louvre was cool. Our favorite part was the Egypt stuff. It was crazy. Stuff down there was over 6000 years old. I want to say some of it was 9000 years old, but I could be wrong. I just remember being amazed that something could last that long. It was nuts.

The Mona Lisa. Ok. Before I saw her I never got it. I never thought she was smiling and I thought she was ugly. When you actually see the real thing she IS smiling and she looks really beautiful! I couldn't believe it! I actually stared at her a long time.

It's interesting how we just like certain things. For me, the arches, and for Greg- everytime he saw writings of any kind he just loved them!

Yes, a real mummy. Seeing mummies freaks me out. Greg thinks it's cool. I always feel like it's inappropriate. I mean, it's somebody's body. This was a real person with a life. How would I feel if someone put me in a glass box and millions of people looked at me and inspected me literally thousands of years later. Bodies are supposed to be sacred. I never feel good about it. It always makes me feel really uncomfortable.

I always loved seeing daily object like this (glasses, bowls, plates). I felt like I got to peek into their actual lives. See the things they touched and used everyday.

They mummied their CATS!!!! FISH!!! Their pets! There was even an alligator!!!

Down, underneath the Louvre.

Mummy caskets. I couldn't believe how big they were, and colorful. They had all kinds of writings inside of them too!

This was taken from a wall of some ancient city back in Abraham's time. I couldn't believe how MASSIVE and COLORFUL is was! I loved it! I always imagine things so dull and ugly back then but this was so beautiful!!! And this was just a piece. I just thought how cool to have such a beautiful palace full of color!

You can't tell from the picture, but this was one of the most graceful, beautiful sculptures we'd seen and then . . .

BAM!!! What a surprise. A hermaphrodite. Yeah, that was a little interesting.

And this was just so beautiful. It was little and petite and just beautiful.

This just reminded me of The Da Vinci Code. There were so many places that reminded me of movies.

Walking home at night.

Notre Dame.

We went to Versailles to see Marie Antoinette's mansion and Chateau.

This is their giant palace. Well most of it, we couldn't fit it all in. It was pretty incredible. I just kept thinking, "What a thing to live here and just roam the halls on a regular basis- weird!"

This is PART of their grounds (way in the back past the water). Incredible beautiful gardens. So ritzy. I can't believe they lived like this when their people were starving. No wonder they had their heads chopped off. And it was on a hill so everyone could see their palace.

It was nice to walk around inside but there was this artist, named Jeff Koones, that had all these TACKY things he called art and they were placed ALL OVER THE PALACE AND CHATEAU!!! You'd walk in these beautiful rooms and front and center would be this twisted art, smack dab in the middle of everything. SO took away from the entire experience! And after EVERY audio blurb they would talk about him. GRRR!!!! It was so frustrating! (His stuff was WIERD!!! He had a piece that was Micheal Jackson and the rest all looked like blow up toys. We felt like the guy was a kid molester)

The hall of mirrors. Pretty cool, especially for way back then.

This is where all the queens slept (and I think birthed their babies). Yeah, I don't get the whole separate bedrooms thing, I don't even think they were next to each other. Marie Antoinette slept here.

The view from a window.

Walking to Antoinette's Chateau . . . wow it sucked. It took SO LONG!!! I want to say over an hour to walk through the gardens and down a never ending road and then finally to the cottage. I kept seeing these shuttles full of old people driving by and I wanted to be on it. I swore we were definitely paying to ride it back and it was closed by then!

Even though it was long, the walk was SOOOO beautiful. Farms, animals, parks. There were boy and girl scouts (well, the french kind) and their families EVERYWHERE!!!! TONS!!! It was crazy. It was really fun to see all the families and kids. You just don't see it in the city. All the kids were dressed REALLY nice.

Ah, we're here. How cute is this?!! There was a little village built so she could have her friends here too. Her house was definitely the biggest and the only one that had a real roof (and not a grass one). I thought that was pretty funny. I guess she had this built so her kids could feel like they were in the country side. We couldn't go inside any of them. I guess they've all just been rebuilt, but it was neat to see. They all had these incredible little gardens. The WHOLE place was so "beautiful countryside". Really, it was so pleasant being there.

Greg liked this one.

Grapes!

Our last day before we trained home to Brussels, we went to Le Musee D'Orsay. It was cool. The art was different than what we'd been seeing. Greg liked this painting of Van Gogh's bedroom. He LOVES Van Gogh. He's not my favorite. Greg likes how all his paintings are bright and colorful. I think they look like cartoons.