Paris, the REST of the story...

I’ve been slacking on the blog, we’ve already done another trip and I haven’t finished this one.

So here it is: Day 2, we get a late start to the day thanks to a couple baby bottles of wine and a stop at the Chat Noir for a follow-up. 11am, we’re ready to hit the tour bus for an overview of the city. We pick up the 2 day hop-on hop-off for $100+, I don’t even want to do the conversion for a bus ride!

First stop, the Louvre:



The Louvre is hardcore about it's art, even the "rule" signs are art:

The Louvre is utterly impressive.. as I’ve probably said fifty times before, you just can’t put a lot of these experiences into a 256kb pic on a blog. I’m almost doing this more to trigger the feelings and memories of our journeys than to share with the rest of you what we’re seeing. I’m just not skilled enough to express or photograph the experience properly, so I apologize.

To sum up the Louvre – I think I was more in awe of the museum or building itself than the priceless art and sculptures it contains. Although, Yan Pei-Ming’s art exhibition is not to be missed if it ever comes to a museum near you. We saw Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, maybe it was the hype, it was cool to see, but not the reaction I thought I would have seeing it in person. I mean, I have a slightly more than average interest in art, I’ve read “History of Art” for fun (the leading textbook used in most every art history major’s curriculum). So I have a good appreciation for the classics; but Yan Pei-Ming’s interpretation was just a smack in the face of freshness. Enough said, check out his work if you can.

Perpsective..

Some American's that we bartered photo skills with to take pics, I think they got the better deal, is that his friggin thumb in the bottom left of the shot?? Thanks.

Inside the Louvre:

Those are all the pics of what you’ve probably seen a thousand times before. We also took the time to check out the history of the Louvre. Here are some pics of the underground, the medieval history of the Louvre:


Model of the Castle that stood in the location of the current Louvre:

Some of the ruins:

Finished as much as our feet could handle of the Louvre, back to the tour bus!

Here’s some pics from around Paris:

Arc de Triomphe:

La Madeleine's Paris. Supposed to have some great acoustics, no windows:

What the....... Brit Car:

Holy crap, is that my dad!? Scooters are popular in France. They are EVERYWHERE... didn't realize what a man of the world my dad was:

Notre Dame, yep, we went to Paris. Here's the proof:

Point ZERO. This is where all distances to Paris are measured from.

La Bastille!

Back to the museums, we visited Musee D’Orsay the last day of our trip. There just isn’t enough time or scar tissue on the bottom of my feet to appreciate all that Paris has to offer. Great exhibits, from Roman sculptures to impressionist paintings, to da Vinci, to once again the structure itself.. Here’s a pic from the top floor of the Musee D’Orsay:

Finally, we got a tip from someone Ashley knows that has spent a lot of time in Paris. We skipped the huge lines to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower (feeling a little regret, but hopefully we’ll go back), instead we went to the top of Tour Montparnasse. As I said, Paris does not have a lot of tall buildings, but Montparnasse is one of the few, it’s 56 stories tall. You can go to the roof and get a 360 degree view of all of Paris, truly one of the best tips we’ve been given. Have a look at some of the pics from that experience and I think you’ll agree:

Just before sunset...

The Eiffel tower at Sunset:

Les Invalides!

The Tower sparkles on the hour with thousands of bulbs...

Unfortunately I injured my ankle weeks ago on a previous weekend trip, around the Stratford-Upon-Avon timeframe. Ashley wears her pedometer all the time – we’ve averaged 20+ miles a weekend walking. My ankle cut our trip a couple hours short in Paris as we haven’t exactly been sitting around to give it time to heal. I held out until it got to the point where I doubted I would be able to make it to our airplane without high-jacking a Rascal (scooter old people ride). :) I can’t begin to tell you the immense pain I was in, three steps and I had to stop.. it got bad! According to Ashley we still pulled off about 15 miles that day alone !!

Naturally, we took a lot more pics than we’ve posted. But Paris is a city that filled the appetite from many aspects and left you wanting more: aesthetically with it’s architecture and layout, visually with it’s unending supply of art/museums, culturally with it’s lackadaisical side street café’s and way of life, culinarily with it’s selection of restaurants that produce some of the best food we’ve had in months.. time and the beating your body takes trying to absorb everything it offers is the only limitation. Worth the pain.

Oh yeah, and they still serve beer at Mcd’s !

Paris in a nutshell. We went to St Albans & Windsor Castle this past weekend, maybe I'll have something posted up before the weekend. We'll see...

Bonne Saint Valentin

Four years of French, straight A’s and couldn’t understand a word. Ash and I spent Valentine's weekend in Paris. There’s a street named Franklin Roosevelt, which in French is apparently pronounced “Frrron Rrroooooooos”. No hope if we can’t even understand English.

We flew Easyjet, which everyone scoffed at - as if we were going to be strapped to a plywood seat and water-boarded on the flight over (ouch, sorry, has Obama signed any bills to fight that yet? Maybe a few hundred billion should take care of it). Maybe we got lucky, but I found it pretty much the same as flying any other airline. It was a bit hectic flying back from Charles De Gaulle; it wasn’t as organized as the flight from Luton, so you had to be a little aggressive to make it to the front of the line since they don’t assign seats, but otherwise, a comfortable flight, polite flight attendants. We will definitely fly with them again.

The first night we checked into the hotel and immediately ventured out to find a fondue restaurant I came across online:

It was full of French charm from the time we walked through the door… hot and stuffy, no personal space, rude staff and belligerent owners. All that I hoped it would be!

Two long communal tables, you sit shoulder to shoulder, the girls have to climb over the table to their seat and they serve wine in baby bottles:

Apparently wine served in stemmed glasses are taxed, so this restaurant came up with a convenient way around the law…

I placed our order in French, fairly straightforward, cheese or meat fondue are your only options and red or white wine. Fromage et rouge s’il vous plait. Appetizing, non?

So as we eat our dinner of bread and hot cheese, sipping on vin rouge, it’s inevitable to make friends with those next to you. Luckily we had a couple of Brits next to us – ahh, English, you gain such an appreciation. They were celebrating their birthdays, which were only days apart. We made the London connection and got past all the basics, working there until June, blah blah, so I asked how old they were – 19 and the other 20 !! Wow, we’re getting old. Haha.. I knew they were younger, but 19??? Geez.

At this point we’re down a couple baby bottles, I had to run out and find an ATM since the place doesn’t take cards and we hadn’t stopped to get cash yet, so by the time I get back (an adventure in and of itself), the owner’s are ready for us to leave. It’s a prix-fixed menu, we’ve been talking to this other couple for an hour plus since we finished dinner, so the owner comes over and bangs on the table and tells all of us to leave. Ahhh, Paris…

It’s late, but our night isn’t over… we’re in the Montmartre area of Paris. We grab a glass of wine at the famous Chat Noir and wander by another famous place:

Then it’s back to the metro:

5 flights of stairs... THAT'S why everyone was lining up for the elevator. Eh, after a bowl of cheese, I suppose we could use the exercise :)

The Eiffel tower looks amazing at night, a monstrosity in a city of low lying buildings, but when the tens of thousands of lights sparkle on the hour, it is a sight to see. We make our way through the quiet streets to the base of the tower, no crowds, it’s like we have it all to ourselves. So we take advantage of the opportunity for some great pictures before going back to the hotel for a long night’s sleep to prepare for the miles of walking to take place over the next few days:

I’ve dreamed of coming to Paris since 8th grade when I started taking French. It intrigued me from day one - who knew I would have such an opportunity this early, I thought it would happen at some point in the future, when I retired.. the first night lived up to all of my expectations and more..

This is just the beginning, but it’s late and I’ve got a lot more pics to share.. stay tuned!

Let is Snow!

Last weekend we didn’t get to do too much because of the biggest snow storm in 20 years. The storm was a front from Russia and pretty much lasted the entire week. Of course the British aren’t used to this sort of snow and ran out of “grit” (dirt) and had to order tons of table salt to put down on the roads.

Here are some pictures:

This is a crappy job; they are shoveling the grocery store parking lot.

I don't know what someone was doing here, but it is funny looking.

Making a snowman.


The kids are trying to "sledge" down this little hill. There is a bigger hill in town, but it was muddy from everyone sledging on it all day.

St. Mary's Church:

We did venture out to the biggest Saturday market in England. The GPS took us down some narrow road. I don’t know how you would fit two cars down it; luckily we didn’t have to find out. The one road was so iced over that it took several tries for us to make it up the hill. If it weren’t for Jay’s Yankee driving skills we would have turned around. Finally we made it to this market and ahh, wasn’t so impressed. But, if you need an Adidas track suit, let us know because that was about the only thing to buy. Very disappointing, but we did end up seeing Slum Dog Millionaire later. At the movie theater here, you get two choices of popcorn, sweet or salty. The sweet is basically kettle corn and the salty is American popcorn, minus the extra butter. So if you ever venture to the movies in England I would recommend the sweet.

We are off to Paris for the weekend, and I am sure Jay will have some more interesting things to share next week.

Need a Bath

Warning - This post is potentially NSFW. If you don't know what that means, you'll figure it out when you get to the bottom and the title of this post will become clear.

I'm going to let the pictures do most of the talking. We went to Bath, Swindon and Oxford this past weekend. Working the adventure backwards on this one...

Sunday was spent in Oxford.

First objective, find some sort of medeival structure to climb... lucky for us every friggin town we go to has one! Here are some pics from the top of Carfax tower located in the center of Oxford:

Carfax tower - the name was derived from the french for Crossroads.. not the company that researches your car VIN and gives you a report. They haven't started selling off sponsorships for their ancient buildings in England yet.



After freezing our butts off on the top of the tower, we grabbed some lunch at a great little cafe Ashley spotted down a random side street and tried to warm up a bit before our 2 hour walking tour.

The walking adventure begins.. we had the most awkward tour guide assigned to us, Ashley remembered her name for some reason - Sally. Sally would provide some great little piece of trivia, then stare at everyone for 30-45 seconds without saying anything, not moving, just staring. Then we'd move on.

Sally: "George Washington's Great-Great-Grandfather went to this school and took off without paying his debt. In 1924 some Canadian & American lawyers visited and paid off the debt without interest."

staring....... silence......everyone else looking around at everyone else....... silence......


Sally: "Let's go, um, over, um, this, um, way....."

UHHHHH.... great Sally, you're friggin riveting.

Back to the pics:

Exeter College, famous graduate: J.R.R. Tolkien and RICHARD BURTON ! No idea who he is.

Crew is the most popular sport at Oxford, with their biggest rival being Cambridge, of course. When a crew on crew gets 4 "bumps" in a season (which is apparently difficult, I'm sure you guys are all Crew experts), they get to do some art on the side of the buildings at the college. Here's an example from 2005... there's still remnants going back into the early 90's on some walls.



From Exeter, we went on to New College. Famous graduate: Hugh Grant, Fellow: Richard Dawkins.

New College also maintains a section of the original wall that surrounded the city.



New College courtyard. You can also see part of the New College Cathedral:




The students dining hall. The students come to dinner in gowns, which is a tradition they voted to keep. Fellows and their guests are seated at the front of the room. The hall is exactly as it would have been when it was originally built:

And finally, a really intense sculpture in the nave of New College Cathedral... when we walked in I was so focused on trying to get feeling back in my face from the blistering cold that when I looked up and saw this, it caught me by surprise, my eyes popped open and I fell in love with it immediately. It's probably 8 feet high and the freaky way the head was contorted and looking over the shoulder of a wrapped body was completely unexpected. Probably the coolest piece of art I've seen the entire trip.. it represents Lazarus in the tomb..

The walking tour finally concluded and we remembered that our tour guide pointed out a Science Museum near us that had free admission - so to get out of the cold (and find a bathroom), we ran in and found this:

It's an original chalkboard that was preserved following a lecture from Albert Einstein. Random, but pretty neat.

Finally - on our way out of Oxford, we bumped into the 4th street vendor on our trip:

Back to Swindon. Ashley's favorite trip in the UK so far.... why would that be? Ancient relics? Rare finds? Unexplored territories? Oh no, wait a minute, they have OUTLETS in England??

Whew, made it just in time to spend a couple hundred bucks. That was close. :)

That's all I have to say about Swindon, except you get what you pay for when it comes to hotels. Just know that and you're good.


Now it's Saturday. We set out for Bath Park & Ride and some 4 yr old kid, who's mouth never stopped running the entire trip from Park & Ride to City Center, points out a random pig in a schoolyard. Then we saw another one in a market, so I was on the hunt for pigs for the rest of our stay in Bath.. later found out it was part of a massive public art project, these are the remants that never made it through auction I guess. You'll see them scattered among the posts below..




Hey look, another medieval cathedral! It really does show the power and wealth the Church held. This is Bath Abbey, quite imposing in the center of town, it easily outclasses any surrounding buildings:



After a tour of the Abbey, we made our way to the Roman baths. Quick fact, the baths are still fed via the same pump system the Romans built. Approximately 250,000 gallons a day of piping hot spring water... they throw in a free glass of it at the end of the tour, it's delicious, you should really try some.....



The red-nosed romans. A campaign to raise money through laughter to help disadvantaged people in the UK and Africa..







This place is enormous. The pictures don't do it justice, here's a random pool that sick people would float in to get healed by the waters.

Lookout.. random pig!

Trying to catch a breather and let my feet rest. Ahh.. nice comfy rock.

PIGS

Pulteney Bridge with shops lining both sides. From gift shops to clothing stores.

Found this maze in a park below the bridge as we wandered randomly around bath.. Ashley sat around freezing, hoping some of the little kids would run into me so she could catch it on camera. And to point out that I was the only adult trying to make it through... :)

Hey, it's the 3rd street vendor we encountered on our trip... this is getting interesting.. that's a guy. Probably the most obscene thing we'll see in Bath... mwahaha

Yep, found another one. This pig was in the middle of nowhere, I barely caught it out of the corner of my eye and made Ashley walk down to the building it was on so I could get a pic:

-------------------------------------------------

Well, we're back to the beginning of our weekend trip and the Grande Finale! We made it to Bath, a properous, sophisticated, classy city. A city of nobles. We jump off the bus in the city center, turn the corner and see a crowd gathering. What the......

Is that dude wearing a thong, in 30 degree weather? Holy crap, it's two dudes....

Playing with fire. But just when you thought it couldn't get any better... keep scrolling down.

Look closely at the next pic... yep, those are sparklers.

The first two street vendors of our trip!

I need a bath.