Onward, But Mostly Upward

Leaving Nancy to Paris as early as we did ended up saving us an additional, unexpected $2000. Our last days in Nancy watching DVD’s and eating soup is for another blog entry, in a parallel universe where everything ever written is about things no one cares about. Instead, here’s a recap of Paris:

If there’s one word to sum up our last week, it’d be stairs. I think we spent about a third of our waking hours on stairs. Our hotel—man it had stairs, six stories worth, winding and narrow, which made for some fun when hauling nine months worth of stuff for two people up and down from our top floor chamber. (By the way, mid-week we were able to unload what we wouldn’t need until January/Chicago, thanks to Annalise’s generous and incredibly resourceful Aunt Linda, who came through in the clutch yet again. Details in parallel universe).

At the metro station, there were stairs, about eight stories worth. Stairs of all sorts: winding and straight, steep and shallow, spotless and urine-soaked. Then stairs at stations for transfers. Then we were staired down at museums and cathedrals. Stairs. Stairs. Stairs.

The second most descriptive word would be the popular choice: art. We hit the Louvre twice, the Pompidou once, and Orsay once, and visited some famous cathedrals. Oh, and the Rodin museum and sculpture garden. The Louvre and Orsay suffer from Delillo-esque tourists taking photographs of the most photographed pictures in the world because they are the most photographed pictures in the world. They push and shove and flash and damage. They are just so goddamn dumb. So many people, of every color and gender, crowded around Delacroix’s and Van Gogh’s, zooming through rooms, framing the frames on Monets and Rembrandts, with their cellphones even, snapping a picture and moving on, without a thought to expend appreciating anything. Don’t these tech-savvy zombies realize that there are 90 million of the same damn shots on Google images, posted by their fellow drones?

Aside from the global convergence of narrow-sighted sightseers, the museums are great. The Louvre is actually the best and the worst museum in the world. It is a wonderful, million-mile walk, up and down the stairs of an art history textbook, the only problem being the most earmarked pages (the ones full of tourist idiots).

The Orsay is also gorgeous and houses its own trove of recognizable masterpieces, with a slightly lower idiot quotient . Both are open one evening each week, outside of standard daytime hours. That’s when you should visit them, there are no crowds then. The second best time to visit is as soon as it opens. That goes for cathedrals too.

Paris was awesome. The food was actually cheaper here than in Nancy, and Annalise was in heaven, ordering salads without meat, bread without meat, ice cream without meat. And the Eiffel Tower was a surprise. I always had thought it’d be small and ugly, but it’s big and beautiful, at night anyways, when it is lit up and, for nine minutes each hour, has about a hundred balls of light haphazardly bouncing off each other and sprinting up and down the ironwork.

We both caught a cold, neither slight nor severe. It wound up and down our hotel’s serpentine stairs and in and out of its shared toilets. The place we stayed at was nice enough though, at least for the 50 euros rate. Having a plastic shower box four feet from the bed was an amusing change of pace, and the toddler a floor below us, who got the same cold but really bad, could be heard hacking violently, even when our door was closed, and if you imagined she was dying, the whole place took on a real bohemian flair!

Onwards and upwards. I’m now officially 26, sniffling, on an express train to Brugge. Maybe they believe in elevators here, and free water.

(Pictures coming in next post.)