Zut!

Finally the Paris post! We arrived in Paris bright eyed and bushy tailed and the city didn't disappoint. I stayed in 3 different hostels over our 10 day stay here, all in the Montmartre district. Our first hostel was near the Sacre Coeur and the fabric district.
View from the Sacre Coeur.



This chat noir wandered throughout the area and chilled with us while we ate our crepes at a cafe. As we kept seeing black cats though, we started to wonder if the district had a secret black cat stash and was just pumping them out for us tourists.
If only all graffiti were as whimsical as Parisian graffiti.


Markets and cafes were everywhere. The neighbourhood markets tended to look like this:Une fromagerie.


Centre Les Halles with view of Notre Dame in background.
We caught our first French protest at Les Halles - from what we could gather it was a Sarkozy-critical demonstration raising awareness about the wrongful deportation of immigrants from France.
I went to a great contemporary art gallery and saw the work of (will remember artist's name soon) who covered canvases and the buildings huge windows in her work.
One of my absolute favourite spots was this canal in the northern part of the city that was always populated with locals hanging out by the water. There were great cafes and restaurants, and even a two-building movie theater on each side. It had an especially relaxed vibe at night when the canal became lined with 20-somethings having late night picnics. We're talking gourmet picnics with wine, pasta, fancy salads, and the oh-so-necessary checkered blankets. Those kids could cook!
It was a love from afar... Croque Monsieurs were calling my name everywhere in Paris. But their insistence on containing jambon complicated matters. We both knew it could never be anything more than a shopwindow romance :(
A made the day trek to the Palace of Versailles. After the first — and very brief — time I traveled to Paris I regretted not seeing Versailles immensely. I didn't want to miss it this time. It was a full day of grandeur and absurd opulence.
This was the room of a few different queens throughout history. The green upholstered chairs were commissioned for the birth of Marie Anntoinette's first child.

The famous Hall of Mirrors.
I couldn't believe how massive the gardens of Versailles were. I could only walk about a quarter of the area, it was just too vast.


The base of the Eiffel Tower.
Modern Art Museum of Paris

I checked out the Palais du Tokyo contemporary art gallery which unfortunately was between exhibits, though I did get to hang out at it's wicked restaurant and gift shop. I love that lamp!

The smelliest museum in the world! It may seem weird but the Paris Sewer Museum was quite cool. There was a lot of information on how the system needed to change during the growth of Paris from Roman times to present day. I found out that along with friend Emmanuel Bruneseau, Victor Hugo spent a lot of time surveying and mapping this underground network in order to gather information for Jean Valjean's adventures in Les Miserables. Apparently the book is of major historical value because of his accurate depictions of the system at a time when few people ventured into the poorly understood maze.






Mom, this one's for you. Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris! The very spot Angela Lansbury picked up her very own Dior gown despite all snooty Parisian obstacles.

A highlight of Paris for me was La Cinematheque Francais which I've wanted to check out since watching Bertolucci's The Dreamers. The Cinematheque was born out of Henri Langlois's attempts in the 30s to prevent films of the silent era from being lost. During WWII he and friends smuggled a large collection of movies for safe-keeping in France that were ordered to be destroyed by the Nazi party. After the war he continued to archive films and items relating to the film industry in general and amassed a museum collection which got funding from the French government. The museum also functioned as a movie theater that is famous for giving members of the French New Wave their film history lessons. A neat story about Langlois: In 1968 the powers that be at the Cinematheque were fed up with Langlois' disorganized work habits and arrogance and fired him from the institution. Students protested and letters of complaint from directors like Hitchcock, Kurosawa, and Felini came in threatening to no longer show their films at the Cinematheque. It worked! Langlois got his job back.

The new Cinematheque building was built a few years ago by Frank Gehry.
Replica of the metallic suit Brigitte Helm had to wear in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Early tickets to screenings from Langlois's film club.
There was a large collection of early experimental animation gadgets by people like the Lumiere Brothers and Edison.
Can you guess this famous skull?
Jules and I checked out the city Aquarium. Those are jellyfish in that blue tank, and some scarily still piranha.


Star Trek. Opening Night. Amazing.

Paris: Some dates... um, I don´t remember anymore, we´ll have to wait for Lins´post. Anyway, 10 days in Paris!

Well, this won´t be an original sentiment, but I fell in love the instant I landed in Paris. What might be surprising is that my first experience of it was the pee-smelling subway car, but the amour still managed to get through to me. That first impression would soon prove to be more than skin-deep.... My first night I wandered aimlessly into some street performers. The performers themselves weren´t really that exciting- it was just a hacky slapstick sort of show- it was the audience I was impressed with! Every time they asked for a volunteer they got upstaged... they´d do funny walks, dances, sing songs... I thought it was a weird phenomenon of that particular square, but then after some more wandering I ran into this ska concert and more of the same sense of flamboyance and fun. There were minivan moms full-out ska dancing behind their strollers!

Adding to my enjoyment was the now very familiar feeling French everywhere (in contrast with Barcelona). It was so good to get REAL french practice, and people appreciate when you´re both struggling through a more or less equally french-english conversation.

There was once again more to see than I can say, but I will mention that I randomly visited the Pompidou Centre one day and ran into one of my old favourites- Alexander Calder (you can probably find some of his work online, he sort of animates junk- but not like stop motion, he just moves it himself). I had always been a big fan of his circuis movie, and was surprised to see it playing. Then I walked into the next room to see the real pieces from the film right there!!

It wasn´t all fun and games I suppose... At any given moment if you turn 360 degrees in Paris you will see at least one couple making out, so that´s annoying... the keyboard was difficult, as I demonstrated to my sista-friend Allie in an email:

" Right now I'm struggling with this zut-full french keyboard... let me show you what I mean by re- writing this sentence as I normally would. Right noz Iù, struggling zith this wut6full French keyboqrd:::: let ,e shoz you zhqt I ,eqn by re-zriting this sentence qs I nor,qlly zould: Ridiculous, non?"

And food was prohibitively expensive. I mean ALL food, so I went on a crepe and fruit diet to save money. When I heard the walking tour guide talking about all the Van Gogh and Picasso types literally living as starving artists in Monmartre where we were staying, the whole thing felt a little too authentic. By crepe trois you´re pretty tired of crepes.

interlude: actually we´ve accumulated a few travel quirks as a result of the little discomforts like this, maybe they´ll sound familiar:

a) As my friend and travel guru Kerri advised, I´ve left most of the clothes I unwisely brought behind at hostels to lighten up. And it feels great! I recommend paring down your worldly possessions to anyone who needs a life freshen-up.

b) Every once in a while after a particularly grody hostel, Lins and I will suffer a kind of two-perosn mass hysteria and convince ourselves we have lice or some other kind of cooties, which leads to ape-like hair examinations every hour or so, when we feel a suspicious itch.

c) I´m now at least 17% composed of Nutella.

But mostly it was amour. France is the one place I´ve felt a truly burning need to return to so far, and at least I´ll be spending more quality time with our Little France next door in Quebec. But it´s true that it did kind of smell like pee sometimes. Just sayin.

ps- There are so many more truly beautiful pics that I didn´t include, PLEASE request a slideshow on my return.

pps- sorry this is turning into a bit of retrospective vs. a live blog!!

ppps- also sorry for some confusing sentences, I´m stealing some time at night so as to feel less regretful for taking hours on the computer

pppps- sorry for all the ps´s.

Dalida, a famous singer in 10 languages, but not English, so you don´t know her.

Lins and I visited a sewer museum, which was one of the oddest but also most interesting we´ve seen yet. This happy (if lumpy) family of rats for instance... what´s that all about?

It was a very genuine sewer experience. I had to leave early to get some smelling salts.

A pic of Lins forgetting that we were there to see Star Trek!!! Which was AWESOME. We had a great chat with an astrophysicist and her IT boyfriend right before- it was nerd-core TO THE MAX. The max, I tell you.

I spend a lot of time just chillin´ ´n´ parks. This one was unusual (Luxembourg, I think) because there were chairs all over the huge sprawling park, and this one crowded strip where you were permitted to use the lawn for sprawling.

The Calder exhibit was no photography, so I busted out some rusty sketchin´and gave it a whirl. This is a wire sculpture, so, hard to go wrong.
The Pompidou Square, my favourite lounging spot.

Cut that out, jerks.

Les femmes. La lune.

Our opera house experience...

We bought seats for 5 € where you have to crane your neck down to see the stage- it was more of a hole in the ceiling than a seat really. Until...

... they closed down our section and we were moved to the orchestra seats!! It was like being bumped from Ryanair economy class to Air Force One. I meant to have a pic of the improved seating in there, but Lins will have to cover me.