Day 3-4-5: London -> Paris

Hey! After being MIA for a few days I'm trying to throw in a quick update about what we've been up to. The absence was due to the extremity of the whirlwind tour in getting out of London and into Paris.

So on the last day of London, Jon & I headed back to the Tate Modern, which is a huge modern art museum in London across the Thames from St. Paul's and near the Globe Theatre. Very cool museum ... lots of interesting - and I mean interesting - stuff. And it was free. Staying within the trip theme. But after a few hours of intense modern art, it was time to move on.

On our last day of London we then hit up Trafalgar Square, which is a huge open space featuring a column of Lord Nelson. I wish I could have figured out what he did, but time restraints as well as sensory overload meant we just accepted the fact that it was there. The column was surounded by four huge bronze lion statues that were deceivingly big and pretty difficult to climb. But at the end of the day, there is some documentation to prove that I have indeed ridden on a lion.

We then walked up to Picadilly Circus - which is kind of like a mini-Time Square in London - and into Soho to grab some food. After a good lunch at the pub we headed up to Oxford Street, which is one of London's most popular shopping streets. I swear there were more people here than anywhere else in London - and more stores, too. I'm talking like 4 Gaps within a mile stretch of road. But the street also featured much cooler, designer stuff that was too cool for me to even look at but from the window.

After Oxford Street we went to Victoria Station to meet up with some of our friends who are also traveling abroad - Kate, Keelan, Rachel, Sadie & her boyfriend Ray who lives in London. We met up with them and headed to Leicester Square to go out for dinner and drinks during our last night. Seeing everybody was awesome, but the night had to end early because 1) we were all dead tired and 2) the girls had to wake up early the next morning to travel. We said goodnight and I went back to the hostel, a little burnt out from traveling and doing so much so quickly. I decided to go to the store to grab the ingredients to cook myself up a gin & tonic, and the morale boost that this bit of home cooking delivered was not to be underestimated.


The next day was our departure from London to Paris. We caught the tube to King's Cross and took the popular EuroStar train under the English Channel and into France. The ride was pretty comfortable and very fast, minus the fact that you needed to pop your ears constantly to release the pressure from traveling through tunnel after tunnel. We arrived in Paris after only about 2 hours, and found our way from Gare Nord to our hotel, the Kyriad Italie Gobelins, via their more-confusing metro. Our hotel was pretty far out of the way, and consisted of little more than a bed, bathroom, and 4 walls to enclose it. That's right - just one bed because they messed up our reservation a little bit. Good thing we're not going on the trip to appreciate our lavish accomodations.

We went down to a bread shop and grocery store along our Avenue de Gobelins, and picked up a bottle of wine for $2.50, baguette for $1, pack of brie for $2, and a bottle opener for $3. Paris is generally expensive, but there's nowhere else that I know of where can you have a comparable meal for about $3 a person. The bottle opener was the most expensive part of the shop!

After dropping our packs off at the hotel, we checked our e-mail and saw that the girls had left a message to meet them for a Seine river cruise at 8:30. We planned to take the Metro there, but since there wasn't a ticket office at our stop, we couldn't get into it. Instead, we were forced to walk the entire way there - probably about 2 miles - without knowing anything about Paris, our even really being able to find ourselves on the confusing road map we were carrying. Somehow, miraculously, we found ourselves by the Seine at Pont Neuf shortly before the boat was set to depart. We found the girls there and hopped on the 9:00 ride down the river. That last sentence is a sort of white lie. It isn't exactly how it happened - there was in fact a 'minor crisis' - but everything turned out OK in the end. Without going into details that would create uneccesary anxiety, suffice it to say that we met up after the cruise to hang out for a bit.

We walked along the Seine for a little while, taking pictures of Paris at night and talking about how our days had been in the city. The conclusion: busy. We made it over to the left bank (the south of Paris' 2 halves, where both groups are staying) and strolled through the Latin Quarter for a bit, eventually finding a delicious looking creperie and ordering some dessert.

We eventually said goodnight, dropped the girls off at their much nicer hotel, and started off on a long, winding journey back to our place. We walked back through the Latin Quarter for a long time, during which we probably walked on every single street in the district at least 4 times. After about an hour of that, we actually tried going home. Trouble was, I couldn't actually find it on the map. This unfortunate circumstance caused us to wander around southeastern Paris for about 2 hours before making it home. Talk about weary - I passed out after a few minutes. Sharing a bed or not.

This morning we woke up and headed down to the girls' hotel in the Latin Quarter to meet up and hit up some museums for the day. On the first Sunday of the month, all of Paris' museums are free! That's today. And in line with the trip plan. We got some croissants for breakfast, packed wine, bread, and cheese again for lunch, and set out for the Louvre. We got there about noon, but as you might expect, you can't bring food into the Louvre, even if you're not going to be eating it. So we grabbed a set of stairs in the square outside and ate our lunch right outside before going in.

Inside was cool, with art from Egyptian times all the way to 18th century France. We saw the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Oath of the Horatii, Raft of the Medussa, Death of Sardanapalus, and a bunch of other cool stuff that people who have taken Intro to Art History would appreciate. The inside is huge and elaborate, so it took a few hours to even crack the surface of the stuff that was inside. But you can only take walking around a museum for so long, even it is is the Louvre. After a few hours it was time to move on.

One other thing I forgot to mention that was pretty unexpected - as we were walking to the Louvre, we noticed that pedestrians were crowding around the main street outside of the Notre Dame. A little investigation uncovered that President Obama was in Paris, and about to be driven down along the Seine in a motorcade. Sounded pretty cool, so we waited there for about half an hour before The Pres decided to make his fashionably late exit. The motorcade drove right by us, and we saw the waving chief of state depart in the back of a black car.

Back to the rest of the day - after going to the Louvre we had wanted to stop into the Museo d'Orsay, which apparently has more recent collections than the Louvre. However, when we got there the line to get in was just about endless. We overheard a kid who was near the end of the line say he'd been waiting for an hour and a half - yikes! We decided it wasn't really worth it to wait and headed over to the Rodin Gardens, a few blocks away. The gardens were actually really cool - really nice plants and flowers, and cool sculptures by Rodin. He's the guy that did 'The Thinker', which we actually saw in the garden. We spent a little while going around to all the Rodin sculptures and taking funny pictures to entertain and revitalize our walking-weary spirits.

Jon & I then went to check into our hostel, where I am right now, at 1:47 a.m. Its called Oops - kinda makes you wonder. The rooms are small, as expected, but the people are nice and social and at least we have bathrooms in our room.

Evetually we went back to the Latin Quarter and regrouped to plan for dinner. We ended up going to some Fondue place that we randomly found. We got both meat & cheese fondue - it was pretty good, but by far the best part was the creme brulee we ordered for dessert. After dinner we debated going out, but decided it might be a better idea tomorrow, when we don't care if we're tired the next day because we'll be travelling. We dropped the girls off at their hotel and wisely took the metro back this time around.

After being to both London and Paris, it's safe to say that the cities are worlds apart. I can't decide which I like better, but they're just so different. London is easier to navigate with the tube whereas Paris is kind of a pain at first. But London seems to be so much more spread out, whereas in Paris everything is happening down by the River. It also seems like everywhere you turn, you catch a glimpse of some kind of famous monument. Paris does seem to have more of an air of imporance. Not that Paris is necessarily better or worse than London, but it's definitely just cooler.

It's also a pretty romantic spot. I mean, even on the nasty metro in you couldn't help but notice 3 or 4 couples expressing some genuine pda over the journey. Above ground, you might imagine, people are even more enamored. This is pretty convenient, since Kate and I are thinking about going out to dinner for our 1-year anniversary tomorrow - you can't really beat the locale. Even if we don't end up doing anything special, it's been really fun going around the city with Kate, Keelan and Rachel. They put our navigation skills to shame in Paris, and it's always cool to see friends from home during the trip.

On a side note, this computer is lame because it doesn't let you upload pics. I think I have a couple good ones even though I dropped my camera on the ground and kind of screwed it up, but I guess they'll have to wait.

One more day in Paris, then off to relax from the city life for a couple days in Interlaken, Switzerland.