Before bed last night, I finally met my roommates and one of them, Geovanni, from Mexico, invited me to join him today on a trip to the Louvre. Well, a touring companion was hard to pass up, so I readily agreed and we made plans to leave the hostel by 8:30 to get to the museum by 9:00. Plans intact, I then set three alarms on my watch, for 7:30, 7:45, and 8:00 respectively, and went to bed.
I woke up this morning to asilence devoid of alarms and received a rude shock when I looked at my watch and saw it was 12:17 pm. To my chagrin, though hardly to my surprise, I had slept straight through my alarms and Geovanni was surely long gone, doubltess off examining the Mona Lisa. Disappointed, I got out of bed, and it was then I discovered that, asleep on the bunk above me, was Geovanni's sleeping form, leading me to the concludion that I have the fortune of rooming someone with sleeping habits identical to my own. As if to prove the point, no more than five minutes after I got up, Geovanni also awoke. We both agreed that, with so much to see in the Louvre, it hardly made sense to begin at 1 pm and rescheduled our plans for tomorrow, with the promise to wake each other up.
So I spent what was left of the day on my own, getting to know the City of Light. There were brochures in the hostel lobby for free walking tours of Paris, and by hurrying, I was able to make the 1:00 departure. My guide was Gianny, a Miami native and '06 graduate of Columbia. Throughout the tour he really made everyone feel like a close friend, learning all 30 names, expressing interest in others' travels, and freely confiding that he couldn't wait to get the hell out of Paris and move to California. For almost five hours, he led us past all the major sites of the city: Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Champs-Élysées , the Arc de Triomphe, and everything in between (I'll be posting pictures soon). Along the way, he told us stories of French history, things to do while in Paris, and that free tours aren't really free, but rather regular tours for which each tourer should decide their own price and pay at the end as a tip. The tour was a great introduction to Paris and I willingly forked over €10 afterwards.
I then set off to find some dinner, along the way passing through L'Église de la Madeleine, a giant old church that I greatly enjoyed looking around. Gianni had suggested that the cheapest way to eat fine French food was by going to, what he called, Food Jewelry Stores, gourmet food shops where one can get expensive food while not paying for the ambience or service of a restaurant. I found just such a place in Fauchon, a glitzy Parisian store full of gourmet goods. I figured a dinner of bread and cheese was probably the most economical way of enjoying the Fauchon fare. Unfortunately, my cheese selection was greatly narrowed by my inability to gauge weight and my fear of selecting an unknown quantity of cheese with a per kilo price in three figures. I opted for the one cheese that was priced by the unit and bought €3 of a soft yellowish cheese whose name started with a B (I didn't bother trying to figure out what it was, since I don't know much about cheese or anything about French).
I then took my bread and mystery cheese to a park where I could eat outside and enjoy a view of the Eiffel Tower. In hindsight, it probably is too bad that I didn't spend more time trying to discern what type of cheese I was purchasing, as I might have realized that "Beurre" is not actually a cheese at all. But I did manage to enjoy a lovely picnic of fine French bread topped with the finest butter I have had the pleasure of eating.
After dinner, I headed off to the Musée d'Orsay, open late on Thursdays. I got there about 2 hours before closing and spent the rest of the evening slowly walking backward and forward in front of the Impressionist works of Monet, Manet, and van Gogh. Two hours was not nearly enough, but in a packed tour of Paris (and with the security guards glaring at me and talking in rapid French), it had to suffice. There is lots of art in Paris, and I just have to accept the fact that I'll only see a tiny fraction of it. Tomorrow, sleep patterns permitting, I tackle the Louvre.
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2 comments:
Great job, Ian! Keep it up! Yeah -- there's no time to do the blog, but you're gonna be SO glad you kept this running commentary. The pix are great, and posting them is an excellent idea -- not only to keep your friends up to date. But also, god forbid, you lose your camera or it gets stolen or it breaks. You don't need to be paranoid, but as you travel around you definitely will encounter people who are targeting young foreign travelers. You may outsmart them or they may outsmart you -- so just keep your bleary eyes open and don't keep all your eggs in one basket.
Many years ago I was staying in a youth hostel in Istambul and run into a kid who just had ALL his stuff stolen. He'd been befriended by a local guy who just wanted to practice his english ... this guy and his girlfriend took this kid around for 3 days to all kinds of places ... and then one day when they went to the turkish baths, took off with his wallet, passport, claim tickets for his luggage (which was stored at the train station), etc. So it was a 3-day set-up. That was quite an eye-opener for me -- I never would have imagined that someone would spend that kind of time. But hey, they had a lot of spare time, so it was very smooth.
Then there was the time that I lost all my stuff (passport, camera, etc.) while trying to take a raft trip on the Sun Kosi river in Nepal, down to India. That's the same river that just created all the huge floods in India. We lost the raft in the middle of the nite, and fortunately were not too far away from civilization to be able to walk back. But we did lose all our great pix. And in those days, it was easier to get another passport.
Your trip sounds great, and it reminds me very much of the excitement I had when I worked a few college summers in various places abroad -- washing dishes in a little restaurant out in the country in Denmark ... working in a small family-owned factory in Brussels ... a summer stint working in a leper colony in Nepal, with stops along the way in Lisbon, Istambul, New Delhi, Thailand.
So have a great time -- stay safe, if you can ... and keep writing. It's fun for us to read all this stuff and to see the pix. And believe me, you will REALLY be grateful in future years to have this kind of day to day, or even week-to-week log.
Bill & Liz
Great job, Ian! Keep it up! Yeah -- there's no time to do the blog, but you're gonna be SO glad you kept this running commentary. The pix are great, and posting them is an excellent idea -- not only to keep your friends up to date. But also, god forbid, you lose your camera or it gets stolen or it breaks. You don't need to be paranoid, but as you travel around you definitely will encounter people who are targeting young foreign travelers. You may outsmart them or they may outsmart you -- so just keep your bleary eyes open and don't keep all your eggs in one basket.
Many years ago I was staying in a youth hostel in Istambul and run into a kid who just had ALL his stuff stolen. He'd been befriended by a local guy who just wanted to practice his english ... this guy and his girlfriend took this kid around for 3 days to all kinds of places ... and then one day when they went to the turkish baths, took off with his wallet, passport, claim tickets for his luggage (which was stored at the train station), etc. So it was a 3-day set-up. That was quite an eye-opener for me -- I never would have imagined that someone would spend that kind of time. But hey, they had a lot of spare time, so it was very smooth.
Then there was the time that I lost all my stuff (passport, camera, etc.) while trying to take a raft trip on the Sun Kosi river in Nepal, down to India. That's the same river that just created all the huge floods in India. We lost the raft in the middle of the nite, and fortunately were not too far away from civilization to be able to walk back. But we did lose all our great pix. And in those days, it was easier to get another passport.
Your trip sounds great, and it reminds me very much of the excitement I had when I worked a few college summers in various places abroad -- washing dishes in a little restaurant out in the country in Denmark ... working in a small family-owned factory in Brussels ... a summer stint working in a leper colony in Nepal, with stops along the way in Lisbon, Istambul, New Delhi, Thailand.
So have a great time -- stay safe, if you can ... and keep writing. It's fun for us to read all this stuff and to see the pix. And believe me, you will REALLY be grateful in future years to have this kind of day to day, or even week-to-week log.
Bill & Liz
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