My Journeys Around the World: Paris Day One

We arrived at Charles DeGaulle airport around 9 pm. We proceeded to take a shuttle into town, but unfortunately, got off at the wrong place. It didn't take long to realize we were well off-course and needed help finding our way to Montmartre, where we planned to find a 2-star hotel for the next few nights. It is at this point that I discovered that despite the many complaints and warnings I had received, Parisians are, in fact both highly friendly and helpful, a trend that would continue over our three days. Of the two of us, one had a very hard time settling on a place, but was quite insistent that we keep looking. Finally, at 1:30 am I put my foot down and got a room. This hotel turned out to be a bit of an adventure.

The next day, I went out early and found a nice little cafe to buy coffee from and some delicious croissants. Catherine's big ambition for Paris was to go see the Louvre. Now, I'm not the biggest art fan, but it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. So, it turns out the Louvre is enormous and is actually a multi-day experience if you want to see the whole thing. I find that it doesn't take long before one 17th Century French portrait looks exactly like every other 17th Century French portrait. After 2 hours of brain-numbing, library-esque silence with no English descriptions to be found, I hurried on to the Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman galleries and of course, the Renaissance sculptures and paintings. There were definitely some highlights and I'm sure for someone who has some knowledge about art, it would make for a fantastic experience. For anyone else, I highly recommend going straight to the highlights pointed out in the map provided and save yourself hours of pain. The iPod certainly helped matters.

As for the adventure of the hotel room, it's not as though anything bad actually happened, it was really just the fear that the building would collapse and crush us at any time. It seems that the curtain (not the curtain rod, but the curtain itself) was a load-bearing curtain and any adjustment could have disastrous consequences.

We finished the day with a bottle of French wine and escargots over dinner while we decided that our relationship would not survive past the end of our trip.

A view of Montmartre from our hotel room

The Louvre from inside the Louvre.

The sculpture commonly known as the Venus De Milo, which is ironic since it is an ancient Greek sculpture and Venus is Roman goddess. It is actually called Aphrodite.