The Long Overdue Vacation: Day 7 – Tourist Trap Day
You can’t do Paris without spending a few hours in the Louvre and going to the Eiffel Tower. Heck, I’ve already been, knew it was going to be crowded and unreasonably expensive, and I still did it anyways because it’s fuckin’ Paris. How can I go home and say I didn’t see either of those attractions? I don’t think we explicitly decided this, but we ended up getting these major tourist traps out of the way at once. And honestly, unlike other tourist traps, these attractions are so spectacular that it’s still worth the hassle the second time around.
Cool Things That Happened:
- Christmas Eve in Paris! It doesn’t get much cooler than that. After 22 Christmases spent with the family, this was a refreshing change from the routine, not that I don’t love my family or anything. I was a little bummed my brother turned 21 without me there, but it was short-lived.
- Les Baguettes et Fromages! The great thing about staying in an apartment just outside of the touristy part of Paris is you get to live life exactly like a local…if that local never worked and ate bread and cheese every day. Pretending to live the stereotypical Parisian lifestyle, I would take a stroll around the block to Avenue de St. Ouen every morning to purchase an armful of baguettes (1-2euros) from the local boulangeries. Avenue St. Ouen is just a street full of local cheese shops, fruit stands, butchers, and other small specialized stores. Streets like these should exist in the States. It’s so relaxing walking amongst the locals and shopping every morning for the day’s meal. Am I in the mood for fish? Let’s go to the seafood stand. How about fruit? There’s a fruit stand on every block. There was at least one shop devoted to each food type. Maybe I embraced French life too much, as I began to find supermarkets excessive and disgustingly American. Anywho, on this day, I bought a gift basket of different French cheeses to go with our daily breakfast of baguettes. While Spain had its zen moments at the cliffs and rooftops of places, zen in Paris was achieved right in our apartment every morning eating our delicious, warm, freshly baked baguettes at our tiny dining table in our tiny Paris apartment. This was good bread people. And this was a good life. The three of us devoured three giant loaves (one each) every morning. The bread was good just on its own. We would try a different cheese from the gift basket a day. They ranged from creamy-and-familiar to putrid-aftertaste-and-what-the-hell-are-those-spots-on-it. If this was the relaxed morning the French have each day, I’m moving out there ASAP. Yes, I would absolutely move to France just for the baguettes.
- The Louvre. The art museum to end all art museums. This place is gigantic. You would think all pre-19th century art exists inside of this museum. The complex itself is a work of art, with the I.M. Pei pyramids, the fountains, and the wings of each building. Organized chaos is a good way to describe this museum. Even with the thousands of visitors there that day (apparently, everyone had the same idea to visit the Louvre on Christmas Eve), we still got in and our tickets quickly, unlike other museums we would visit. The three of us split up and spent a good four hours exploring. This would be not-enough-time and more-than-enough-time all at once. Favorite spots in the Louvre were anywhere that didn’t have a million people looking at the same thing. For anyone going to the Louvre and want an less-visited but under appreciated section, Napoleon’s apartment is pretty spectacular. There was also a really crowded, but great special exhibit on Picasso. In Barcelona, we passed on the Picasso museum, and I think we sort of regretted it because at least Alan and I were Picasso fans. Turns out, all the good stuff was in Paris anyways.
Peekaboo. I see Louvre.
Géricault's Raft of Medusa. I just had took a class where we analyzed this painting, so this one had significance to me.
Napoleon must have hosted some rockin' potluck dinners in his time.
A room full of gigantic paintings. My happy place.
- The Eiffel Tower. Still as awesome as the night before. We took one of the last elevators up to the top, because it took so long to walk from dinner to the Eiffel Tower. What you may not know is that to get to the top of the Tower, you have to take two separate elevators up. In an exceptional example of Ezeibe’s “fast metabolism,” he nearly made us miss the last ride to the second elevator to the top because he had to use the bathroom, again. On his return, “How does it feel peeing in the Eiffel Tower?” Alan asked in his kind-of-sarcastic-but-actually-irritated tone of voice. I chuckled, but then I nearly missed the elevator when I misplaced my elevator ticket. Wouldn’t be the first time (foreshadowing). Up top, I forgot there’s a very creepy room with wax figures of the people who used to live on top of the Eiffel Tower. Otherwise, the view was great as usual. It was really frigid and windy up there at night, but the lighted city are worth the mild discomfort. The clock hit 11PM, and the tower went all sparkly again, which nearly sent me into epileptic seizure.
City of Lights lives up to its name
Tall man on Tall Tower.
Not-So-Cool Things That Happened:
- Let’s go back to our apartment for a second. The name of the apartment was “Cozy Carpeaux.” And boy was it extremely cozy. The bathroom was probably the size of my closet. You only had room to stand, either in the shower or in front of the sink. Otherwise, you had to sit on the toilet next to the sink. The shower was too small to sit in. Words cannot describe how small this bathroom was. Barely functional, and far from comfortable. I have no idea how Alan used it daily. The rest of the apartment was pretty small too, but still had all the nice amenities, guidebooks, dvds, kitchen supplies, a decent (if smaller) kitchen. The couch pulled out into two single beds. You know I hate futons, but this one provided a good night’s sleep. There was a roomy’ish bedroom that Alan had, but I had to share the armoire in there with him. So yeah, we bumped into each other frequently, but still, the price couldn’t be beat and we were all fairly comfortable for our seven days.
- The walk to Avenue St. Ouen was full of dog poop. Landmines everywhere, everyday. Pick up after your dogs, French people!
- Alan and I argued about how to get to the Louvre. Uncomfortable with new modes of transportation, Alan wanted to stick to what he knew, the metro. I argued that the bus line, whose stop was closer than the closest metro stop, took us directly to the front of the Louvre. I won the argument. We got confused as to how we pay for the ride, and ended up not paying. So we shrugged and rode for free. Huzzah for the honor system! We would continue to play dumb the next few times we rode the bus until we “discovered” there was a ticket machine. I might have won the argument, but then our bus went ahead and got stuck in crazy Parisian traffic for 30 minutes. I stared out the window and quietly ignored the shit talking from the two fellow travelers behind me.
- If the Louvre was Hollywood, the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, and Venus de Milo would be Angelina Jolie, Paris Hilton, and Kim Kardashian respectively. They’re surrounded non-stop with paparrazzi, except their paparazzo may have had a higher ratio of Japanese. I have a new dream to be in a room alone with the Mona Lisa, which is about as likely as being in a room with Angelina Jolie. You may be thinking “Did he really just type that?” But until you see the clusterfuck that is constantly in front of the Mona Lisa, you will never understand.
Wasn't even going to attempt the crowd manuevering.
Leave Venus Alone!
- Ezeibe needed to get the typical outdoor Parisian cafe experience out of the way, and felt he needed to do it at a cafe right by the Louvre. This was a visibly bad idea, but for whatever reason, we were all too thirsty or exhausted to fight this battle. So out comes the GPS phone, or, as I now refer to it, my mortal enemy. We circled around the block a million times looking for this supposed amazing cafe where we could get some hydration. Never found it that day. Two or three days later, we would discover the cafe was IN the Louvre plaza, not outside of it. We instead settled on a similar looking cafe that had seats, heated awnings, and a decent people-watching view. My tea costed 6 euros. We paid 21 euros for a hot chocolate (Ezeibe), tea (me), and a cafe au lait (Alan).
- Ezeibe also picked our dinner spot. He was missing some home-style African cooking and decided that Japanese food would be the next best substitute. So we had Japanese food on Christmas Eve. This was only slightly less disturbing than having Vietnamese food on Christmas Eve every year. What’s worse, I’m pretty sure we went back to our apartment all the way uptown only to settle on this restaurant, and go back to just a few blocks behind the Louvre. Efficient travelers, we are not.
Near Disasters/Meltdowns:
-My ankles. Museums are painful. Standing, walking, and staring up does a number on your back and feet when you’re at it for four hours. And then we made the genius move to…you guessed it…WALK…from Japantown to the Louvre. I think the justification was that we could see the Eiffel Tower, how far could it actually be? Pretty damn far, for the record.