Paris!

Went to Paris this weekend with Isabel.  We stayed with her uncle and his family in Garches, a pretty suburb just outside of Paris.  We arrived late Friday afternoon exhausted from rolling suitcases of dirty laundry up a large hill.  Then we spent the evening eating pasta and clementines, skyping, doing laundry, and watching a 17.5 minute video of Tessa single-handedly eating an entire pie (yes!).  And then we went to bed.

 

I went to Paris to do laundry…don’t judge.

 

After a good night’s sleep we made our way into Paris to meet Stephanie (!!!).  Thanks to wireless internet access, that morning we found out Chris Brown and Rhianna were back together. Baffled, bewildered, shocked, and 8 kinds of disappointed, we were missed our train and were late meeting Stephanie.  I blame Chris Brown.  I think Rhianna should too. 

 

Anyway. We get to the city around 11:30am and we’re finally ready for our big adventure.  Our first stop?  A giant statue of a thumb just outside the metro station at La Defense.  It was great, I swear, I took pictures.

 

Then a brief lunch.

 

And the real day begins.

 

Around noon.

 

Don’t judge.

 

We started off at Sacre Coeur where we were verbally harassed several times over in both English and French on our way up and down hill to get to the basilica.  However, it was a gorgeous day, the sun was shining, birds were singing, and tourists and natives alike were picnicking as far as the eye could see, so I forgave the world.  Sacre Coeur itself was beautiful, although it was strange to be inside a basilica so heavily toured.  The walls of the churches were covered in the usual relics, religious statues, tombs of the religiously important, etc, but they were interspersed with dozens of posters and trip tics in various languages elaborating the practices and beliefs of the Catholic church.  I get the idea, share the faith, spread the faith, but it felt more like a museum than a basilica, plus there were multiple gift stores where chapels used to be.  That kinda stuff tends to bother me.  It’s like when Jesus was at the temple and they were selling all kinds of things and he was like ‘not cool guys,’ that’s sorta how I feel.  I don’t have a problem with pamphlets, an explanatory sign here and there, heck, I don’t even mind guided tours.  But when a church ceases to be a church and instead becomes a man-made spectacle for tourists, it makes me uneasy. 

 

Anyway.  It was beautiful.  And I did enjoy seeing it.  So on to other things.  After Sacre Coeur, we milled around a nearby park to decide what to do next.  The park was so uneventful, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it EXCEPT someone had tagged a wall with the phrase “myspace forever;” and it made me wonder what the world had come to.  It also made me wonder if myspace will really last forever.  I hope not.  (Go Facebook!  Just kidding…mostly) 

 

Next we went to the Eiffel Tower.  We took a lot of pictures; I was not in very many of them because I was the only one with a camera who also insisted on human subjects in my pictures. This became something of a theme for the day: “Isabel and Stephanie see Paris! …oh wait!...wait for it…wait for it… There’s Shannon!”  (No worries though, I laugh through the tears)  There was one really awesome shot, however, that Stephanie took of me and Isabel in front of Notre Dame (where we went after we wandered from the Eiffel Tower, down the Champs-Elysées where we got crepes after a long and arduous search).  I think we looked photo-shopped because I turned the flash on.  I will partage apres this post (ps-I’m now totally fluent in franglais).

 

After Notre Dame, we strolled toward Boulevard St. Michel and stopped at Shakespeare and Company, an awesome English-language bookstore above which, according to Stephanie, artists can live in exchange for their work. I was a fan.  There we met up with Liz, who is studying in Rome for the year along with Stephanie, and walked a few blocks to get waffles (about an hour after crepes, it was a day of wild and reckless abandon).  After a bit more wandering, Isabel and I said goodbye to Stephanie and Liz, and made our way back to Isabel’s uncle’s for a fantastic dinner followed the next morning by a wonderful brunch in which I ate, among other things, too many fresh-baked, home-made muffins, if that’s even possible.  With a quick hustle, a few metro stops, and a mad dash or two up several flights of stairs, Isabel and I made it to our train with a few minutes to spare and had a smooth ride back to Angers during which I summarized the plot of Slumdog Millionaire, which, in classic Shannon fashion, took the better part of an hour.