Paris When It Sizzles

I'm in Paris! Not that I'm excited or anything...

So Sunday night in Barcelona Laura and I went out for dinner to a rather flash restaurant and had rather spectacular meals. I had cannelloni to start, best I've ever had, and Laura had roast vegetables. Then for our main we got paella - yum. Dessert was toffee tart (me) and an apple creme brulee with catalonya cream (her) and both were delicious. We had some sangria and lots of chat, it was a really great night. Nice way to end our trip and almost our visit.

So Monday we were headed back to Lyon, not so early it was painful but not late enough to do anything interesting in the morning so we just packed and ate breakfast before catching the bus to the airport. Excitingly I have developed a cold so the flight was fun; as was returning to the cold weather here in France. We got back to Lyon with enough time to run some errands and then I took an unexpectedly long nap! We didn't sleep much so added to my illness I guess I needed to catch up on rest. Dinner was simple and Sondra, Laura's friend we had dinner with, came over too. I wasn't really the best company, I spent most of the night packing!

My train left for Paris (well, a stop near Paris which was €20 cheaper than Paris itself and only a short cheap train ride away) at 9.30 and Laura lovingly accompanied me to the station and saw me off. She looked very French sitting alone on the bench in the station looking at the train pulling away; it seemed like a movie where I should have leapt off the train to declare my love. I went to Paris instead.

Got to my hostel okay, no dramas. Room wasn't ready yet so I just dumped my stuff and went to see Monmatre and Sacre-Coeur. The Cathedral is beautiful and Montmartre is very interesting, different than I expected! It is very picturesque but it's also full of tourists, immigrants and stalls of cheap stuff, really lively and fun. I wanted to get stuff done that afternoon because I only have four days here and there is so much to see that I can't waste time so I walked down to the Cemetery and spent almost two hours wandering around paying my respects to Wilde, Delacroix, David, Gericault, Ingres and Edith Piaf. I couldn't find Sarah Bernhardt or Modogliani and I forgot about Jim Morrison because I'm not that big a Doors fan anyway so I was more excited about Gericault than Morrison.

Around 5 I headed back to the hostel, picked up some groceries on the way. I made myself pasta for dinner and spent a lovely evening in the social area being social! There are a couple of Aussies staying who have already made a bunch of friends in the city (after only two days) so we had a couple of music students, three Spanish tourists and a Danish guy who comes to Paris for a week every year. Also an American from Hawaii whose parents are hippies (her name is Amazing Grace, her brother is Orion Skywalker) and a British woman on her way to London from Albania. A multi-cultural night with lots of great travel stories.

Today I went to the Louvre and blew my mind. I got there before 10 and didn't leave until after 4, with only about 20 min break for lunch in the middle. And I still missed stuff! But I saw so many amazing things. One of the electives I took at Uni was an Art History paper on art around the time of the French revolution so I had studied a lot of painters and paintings from about 1780 until 1860 and had such a fantastic time seeing the pure scale and colours which photos can never reproduce. These paintings are huge! The Death of Sardanapalus and The Raft of the Medusa (Delacroix and Gericault respectively) are two of my favourites and they are so big they wouldn't fiit on the wall of my room. I can't describes everything I saw, you'd be here for 6 hours! Yes, I saw the Mona Lisa, though why anyone was staring at her when Ingres' Grande Odalisque is in the next room I don't know.

After that I decided to hit the Arc de Triomph before dark and the Eiffel tower to see it all lit up so I walked along the Camps-Elysee, bought a crepe, and watched the crazy Parisian traffic. Arc was cool, Eiffel tower was pretty in a kind of weird way. It's lit up blue so it's a bit strange looking. I'm trying to decide whether I have to see it in the daytime or if I can tick it off my list. I guess it will depend mostly on time.

So that's it for the last few days, tomorrow I'll hit Notre-Dame and the Musee d'Orsay, all going to plan. Paris is beautiful, all the quotes are true!