Feb 3-6, 2006
Reflections on Paris

Corey and I had the opportunity to go to Paris last weekend. We had a lovely three hour train trip from London to Paris because there is a tunnel that goes through the English Channel, connecting England to France. Paris is quite different from London. The subway is a bit dirtier, everywhere you go people are smoking (restaurants and subway cars included), and there are no Starbucks on every corner. Many more homeless people too.

How Do You Say “Take-Out?”
Paris is definitely not for the faint of heart. If you took French in high school for one semester and haven’t really spoken it since (like me), it can be a bit daunting. We needed to crack the code, so we took a pocket dictionary and practiced our “Parlez-vous anglais?” like never before. Finding a restaurant for dinner was a special challenge. Once I figured out that “boulangerie” means bakery and “brasserie” means pub, and “croque-monsieur” is a toasted ham and cheese sandwich that must be avoided at all costs, things got a bit easier. But then there was the menu thing. We had to look up every little word, and if we thought we could guess the meaning of something, we were always completely wrong. Thankfully, our first night (in a very smoky bistro), we had a kind waiter who spoke absolutely no English but had a great sense of humor and laughed at our poor French language stumblings. Not everyone was so kind about it, but most people took the fact that we were tourists with a grain of salt.

Oh, and another thing about Parisian restaurants….they’re not for the faint of budget, either. The average cost for one meal alone was roughly 15 euros (you’ll have to Google the conversion rate if you’re interested.) If you hunt, you can find a place that has meals for 10 euros. However, the bakeries are fantastic and inexpensive. I can’t remember a time when I’ve eaten more chocolate éclairs or chocolate croissants. And we were walking everywhere, so the pounds didn’t stick to our bodies :-).

Major Site Seeing
Besides eating and cracking the food ordering code, we did plenty of site seeing. It was a very cold weekend (our first night we had snow squalls), so we tried to find free, indoor things to do. The major thing we did outdoors that wasn’t free was take the elevator halfway up the Eiffel Tower our first night. It was very cold and snowing, but so incredible! Paris is absolutely gorgeous at night from that far up. And they make the Tower do this sparkly thing every hour on the hour. It was so pretty. We were staying in a hotel very close to the Tower our whole time there, so we got to see the sparkly effect often.

Other sites that we visited include Notre Dame (the largest cathedral in Europe), the Arc de Triumph, the outside of the Louvre (besides the price, the sheer size made us decide to save the indoors for another trip), and an art museum right across the river from the Louvre called the Musee D’Orsay. The D’Orsay is especially wonderful because not only does it house a fine collection of very famous works by Monet (Water Lillies, Haystacks, etc.), Van Gogh, and Whistler (Whistler’s Mother), to name a few, but it is absolutely FREE ADMISSION on the first Sunday of every month.

Welcome to the Hotel….Kleber
We needed to switch hotels for our last night in the city (Super Bowl Sunday, by the way) and found a very charming hotel called Hotel Kleber on the north side of the river. I highly recommend this hotel if you go to Paris. But buy your breakfast at a grocery store or bakery…it’s much cheaper than the hotel breakfast brunches. Unless you’re completely loaded, then eat at the hotel!

How do you say "Super Bowl" ?
Oh….and the last of the last things….the Super Bowl is just not the same in French. I promptly fell asleep (it was 1am, anyway). Not seeing the Super Bowl with Americans caused a little home sickness. I hope you all had fun :-). But we did find a Pizza Hut and took pizza to the hotel that night. Americans have their traditions too, you know!