Paris, C'est la vie

Maï-lys is going to be looking at this post very carefully, so I have to be careful what I say.

Paris was a bit colder then Rome, because a cold front came in that morning. That's ok though, I was comfortable in my sweater that was starting to get just a little smelly. The first thing we did when we got to Paris was eat pastries:

Seriously, how can anyone walk by that and not order something? We both got the pastries in the top left, which were kind of like delicious apple pies.

My guidebook said that Parisians were not nice to tourists, and recommended asking French people if they speak English in French before talking with them. "Parlez-vous l'anglais ?" got committed to my memory, but I don't think it was really necessary. When we ordered the sweets and I said it, the baker laughed and said, "Of course!"

I was worried we would have a bad reception in France, but every French person I met was quite nice and tried to help us as much as they could. They were much kinder than the Italians we encountered. The baker gave us directions to the Arc de Triomphe, which was only a few blocks away, and we were off!

I'm not sure which I preferred, the arch in Rome or the arch in France. The French one, I suppose. It's so big that some guy flew a plane through it once! Crazy French. Underneath the arch there's a tomb for an unknown soldier, and an everlasting flame that never goes out. Wow, actually I was just looking on wikipedia, and it turns out that it did go out once:

"On June 30, 1998, the flame was extinguished when a drunken fan of the Mexican national football team urinated on the flame. He was subsequently charged with public intoxication."

Amazing. So anyways, The Arc de Triomphe marks the beginning (or end, depending how you look at it) of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées:

Kind of hard to get a good picture of it, because there's so many cars. For those that don't know, Champs-Élysées is where you go shopping for Prada, Louis Vitton, etc. And I know you're worried, but don't be, because there's also a Disney store. There's also really nice and expensive restaurants, bakeries, etc. But that wasn't exactly in our budget, so we just walked along it.

the 8e Arr is short for 8^e arrondissement, or the 8th district. Paris is split up into 20 arrondissements.

Toward the end of Champs-Élysées there are more gardens, and a Ferris Wheel, which marks the beginning of the Place de la Concorde. This is where King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and many other notables were guillotined. But it's not all bad; it also has a neat little obelisk, and some lovely fountains:

Just east of the Place is Tuileries Garden, which has a bunch of artsy statues, but we didn't end up going there until a little later. We were eager to see the Eiffel Tower!

The walk to the Tour Eiffel was good because it was along the Seine, and we saw many beautiful bridges along the way. We struggled to get good pictures of the tower because it was cloudy. After waiting patiently, we finally got break in the clouds and took pictures like maniacs:

The white balls in the tower and next to it are rugby balls. France was hosting the World Cup Rugby games, unfortunately France was already eliminated by this point.

We stopped and got crepes nearby, because that's what you do when you're in Paris. I got mine with ham, egg, and cheese; mom got hers with apricot jam, I think. I liked hers better; the dough he used was different. Heres a short video of how a crepe is made (my mother insisted I take the video):

The crepe maker was a pretty funny guy: when I asked for a coke, he made a snorting motion with his nose, and said: Coke? I didn't want any cocaine though, not while mom was around anyway. (Just kidding Mom) When we were done eating, Mom tried to get action shots of birds taking little pieces of crepe right out of my hand, but she had no luck. The crepe maker didn't like the birds; he took out some machine that made a loud ringing noise to scare them away, but it did absolutely nothing. Hunger is more important then avoiding loud noises apparently.

After the crepes we went underneath the tower. After taking pictures of the Tower from every angle possible, we took a taxi over to the Notre Dame:

Notre Dame was stunning. Inside was beautiful as well:

We both looked hard, but we couldn't find any hunchbacks inside. Mom lit a candle though, and we also bought one to bring back to Grandma. After a while, we decided to walk over to the Louvre.

The Louvre (pronounced Loov) is a famous art museum that houses the Mona Lisa, along with many other famous works. Unfortunately, the Louvre was closed because of the transport strike - which didn't really make much sense to me, but whatever. At least we got pictures of the glass pyramids:

Da Vinci code style. We had to rest our tired feet for a while after we walked there, because four days of long walking was starting to take a toll on our tired feet. We tried to find a taxi to our hostel. It took quite a bit of effort. Both the Metro and buses weren't running, so taxis were overloaded with people needing rides. We walked through the Tuileries Garden on the way to find a better place to get taxis, and encountered some pretty crazy art:

Big boots!

I call this Tricky Fountain, because the water wasn't really that deep so to cover the streetlights...also that wouldn't make sense because the truck isn't covered. And why is there a chandelier in the back of it? Crazy French.

And here is a ball of metal objects. Ok, enough of the crazy art now. So we tried getting in a huge line for taxis, but no taxis were stopping. So we walked a little towards the hostel and tried at a less crowded one, and after 15 minutes or so of waving at taxis we were able to get a ride over to Place de la République, which was just 2 blocks away from our hostel.

The hostel was overall pretty good. The receptionist was very helpful, and the 4 bed room was pretty nice. We had our own bathroom, which was great. One of our roommates was headed home to Australia the next day after a year of traveling abroad. She gave me a lot of advice about where to stay in Istanbul and Amsterdam that I immediately forgot. After me and Mom took showers, we went out for dinner.

I promised Maï-lys I would have a doner kebab in France, because she swears they are much better. They are quite different then they are in Britain:

Kebabs in France are kind of like a cheesesteak without the cheese. I personally like the British version better. The meat is in bigger pieces here. It's delicious.

After our kebabs, we walked around for a little while, and headed over to another pastry place. I can't remember the name of what we had, but it was good:

It's kind of hard to see, but mine has music notes on it. It was pretty, almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

After dessert we returned to the hostel and went to sleep. We had to get up at about 6 I think. This is when our transportation woes began. We tried to have our receptionist call for a taxi, but there were no free taxis in three different companies that he tried!

We tried the metro, which was partially running now, just to go somewhere else and try to catch a bus. After 20 minutes of waiting, we decided to walk over to Gare du Nord, where our roommate told us there was a free shuttle to the airport. It was a bit of a walk. Maï-lys tells me that Gare du Nord is where all the gangsters are, but I didn't encounter any. All we encountered was a big confusing mess.

Gare du Nord is a huge bus/train station that no one can understand. We asked about 20 different people how to get to our airport, and we got 20 different answers. We tried to catch a taxi, and some guy scammed us out of a couple euro because he told us he would take us but it turns out he was just carrying our bags to the taxi line. Which of course wasn't moving.

We tried the metro, buses, everything, for at least an hour and a half. The crazy French, they don't even know their own train station! Eventually we found a free train over to Charles de Gaulle airport, which I think is what our roommate was talking about. If your reading this, thanks roommate! Sorry that I forgot your name.

The shuttle was fun, because I tried to guess how to pronounce the names of the stops before the lady on the intercom said them. I started to get pretty good: the key is to cut off about 3 letters off the end of any french word. We were quite anxious though, because we though for sure that we were going to miss our flight and have to pay for new ones...

We made it to the airport about 15 minutes before our flight was supposed to leave. After much begging (s'il vous plait, s'il vous plait, please, please) she let us go! We ran through customs and the security checks and got on line, deliriously happy we weren't going to have to waste any money. It was a great ending to a great trip. Our flight was slightly delayed because of some problem at Bristol Airport, it turns out, which was more than likely our saving grace. Our plane was fairly empty - it seemed like other people were having problems as well getting to the airport, and didn't get as lucky as us.

C'est la vie.

When in Rome...(Not Bangladesh)

Oh man, I'm really falling behind. Time to play catch up.

We flew into Rome Ciampino early the next day. First and foremost, we went to a little marketplace outside and bought me some Italian underwear. I needed some, because all my wash was still soaking wet back in my room in Bristol! So now I have two pairs of quite uncomfortable Italian boxers called NaiGe.

Immediately there were problems. The metro wasn’t working, so we had to take a bus into Rome. Instead of taking 10-15 minutes and being right next to our hostel, it took about an hour and a half and dropped us off about a half hour walk away. Also, the bus was jam packed and But when life gave us lemons, we decided to go and get some pizza, because we were hungry.

Our first pizza was possibly the best. It didn’t have any sauce, but it had mushrooms and sausage instead, which more than made up for it. After a couple of slices and a short rest, we got back on the road to check into our hostel.

It took a few wrong turns and a lot of walking before we finally made it to the hostel. We were a bit tired, but we had many things to see, so we freshened up and headed for the Coliseum:

The ruins around the Colosseo, called the "Foro Romano" (Roman forum), were quite impressive as well:

The Arco di Costantino.

The Palantine is also right next door, where the emperor used to live. I think the coolest thing about this area is that nothing is really roped off: you can just go ahead and sit down on ruins from the B.C. era! I swear I could see Marcus Vorenus (from the HBO series Rome) cutting people's heads off in the distance.

We wanted to go inside the Coliseum, but if we bought the ticket we would have only had a half hour or so inside as it was getting late, so regrettably, we had to skip that. But we walked down the street and saw a few more really old Roman buildings, and the Piazza Venezia, which is an absolutely gigantic monument. I took a couple of blurry pictures of it, but they didn't turn out because my camera is rubbish. Also somewhere along the way, we had our first gelatos, which we indulged in quite a few times for such a short trip...

From there, I believe we took a taxi over to look at the Trevi Fountain:

Of course we were obligated to throw coins over our shoulders into the fountain - so now we'll be sure to come back. After a long sit at the fountain, we headed back towards the hostel for dinner. Dinner was absolutely delicious. I had a little house wine and eggplant parmigiana (which was super cheesy delicious), and Mom had lasagna. The lasagna had no tomato sauce in it, and we joked that she'd been in Italy almost a full day without eating something with tomato sauce! We both had grilled chicken for the second course. Dessert was tiramisu for me, and some kind of delicious custard thing for Mom. I wasn't prepared for the coffee, which was quite strong. After dinner, we headed back for the hostel. Along the way we bought ourselves some cannolis from a bakery for the next day. Just in case anyone was wondering, I think between my mom's cooking, Gelatos/pizza in Rome, and pastries in Paris, i gained about 5 pounds in a week.

The hostel in Italy was quite nice - I think it's my favorite that I've been in so far. We had 6 other people in our room, all of whom were quite nice and friendly. One was a girl from Australia, one was a guy from Ireland, one was a guy from Singapore, and there was a guy from Montreal as well. The only problem was one of the workers when we were checking out - his English wasn't very good, and he thought he was supposed to keep my 10 euro deposit for the lockers. But we got that all sorted.

The next day we had the free hostel breakfast, which was pretty much rubbish, and the cannolis for breakfast. I think I'm aspiring to be a big fat Italian man that eats cannolis and pasta all day. And in Rome, I did pretty much just that.

We took the metro to the Vatican. We woke up late and took our time getting ready to go, but little did we know that we would be just in time to see the Pope giving mass! He was speaking in Italian, so we didn't understand a word he said, but it was still awesome. Here he is in the Popemobile:

Here's a better view of St. Peter's Basilica:

As you can see, it was quite packed. After the Pope was done talking, we got in line for what a few different people told us was the queue for the Sistine Chapel. We found out that it was actually the line for the inside of St Peter's though, so I went searching for the Sistine Chapel while my Mom stayed in line. But when I found out where to go and came back, they weren't letting anyone into the plaza! So we had to waste a bit of time looking for each other, but we eventually did. We took a break and got ourselves some pizza:

I forgot to mention that somewhere along the way, I had bought myself a Roma shirt for 5 euro. Probably the cheapest thing I bought on the whole vacation...

So once we were fueled up, we were ready to go and check out the Vatican Museum/Sistine chapel. Wow, do they have a lot of stuff. The thing about Rome is that there's just so much to see that it's overwhelming. When every few blocks there's beautiful statues and monuments, they start to become less interesting then they should be. Eventually, the Spanish Steps become just steps, and all the beautiful sculptures in the Vatican Museum become just ordinary. It's unfair, I think, but true nonetheless. Anyways, here's one of my favorite parts of the Museum:

I thought it was just as beautiful as the Sistine Chapel, but I'm pretty sure it didn't take 4 years of painting on your back, and the artists were certainly not Michelangelo. It's called the Gallery of Maps, because there's a bunch of maps painted on the sides, but I preferred the artwork on the ceilings.

After much more beautiful exhibits, we finally made it into the Sistine. It was very beautiful. They're very strict inside: you have to be quiet and you can't take pictures. But I did manage to sneak one in (Shhhhhhhhh!):

It turned out like crap because I was trying to be so sneaky, but you can tell it's the Creation of Adam. I got tsked by an Italian lady for taking this picture by the way. I felt ashamed when I saw her waving her finger at me, but not ashamed enough to delete it...

Afterwards we took the metro back to the Spanish Steps:

They were alright. It was under construction or renovation at the time, so that was kind of lame; also it was really crowded with tourists (ugh...touuuuuurists), and didn't quite compare to some of the other sights of Rome (at least I don't think it did). So we hung about on the steps for a little bit as a well deserved break, and then headed over to the nearby Pantheon:

It was originally a temple to the Roman gods, but was converted into a church. When we went in there was an orchestra playing, and it was really beautiful inside, despite a big hole in the ceiling:

Someone really ought to fix that.

After a walk around the Pantheon, we strolled over to the nearby Piazza Navona. A couple of things of note happened there. 1) A live band struck up a tune right next to us and 2) I was scammed into buying a piece of string for 3 euros. Here's a video of the band:

After watching them for a bit, I fell prey to a guy who wanted me to hold out my pinky. At first I said no, but I was quite intrigued, so he convinced me to. He wrapped up red, white, and green string using my pinky, all the while sweet-talking me and my mother. He told me that I have been drinking a little bit too much because I have a beer belly, and he said he thought my mom was my sister:

I told him he better not even try to tell me that this thing cost 20 euro, and he laughed and told me it was a million dollars. Then he tried to tell me it was 5 euros, and mom said no way. To which he replied "This is not Bangladesh, sweetheart. It costs 5 euros for a cup of coffee." So after a bit of bargaining, I got a piece of string for 3 euro. I'm going to keep wearing it until it falls off. I think it was worth the 3 euro just for the story, and the realization that we weren't in Bangladesh.

The Italians as a people weren't really very friendly, but I don't blame them really. I don't like when summer tourists come to Brick, so I can understand why they'd be annoyed with us. That being said, there was no reason to be as rude as some of them were.

For dinner, we had fried mozzarella and pizza again! My pizza had prosciutto on it, Mom had spaghetti:

All of the Italian food we ate was quite delicious. We headed back to the hostel and watched a nature special with a bunch of the people staying there. It was about indigenous tribes of the Amazon, and this English guy who joins them for a couple weeks, it was funny.

We found out that the metro doesn't run late at night, and neither do buses, and we had to leave quite early for our flight the next day. So we had to reserve a taxi to drive us back to the airport, and it wasn't cheap. But that's ok, because we made it to Paris the next day, and we had a wonderful stay in Rome.