Paris (and a bit of London), a photo tour

It was a long trip, and I'm sure you don't want to hear about every gory detail. So I will gloss over the day we spent in London as well as our 3 days in Paris in a quick photo tour. Above you can see me sitting on one of Paris's wonderful public rent-a-bikes. Look at me go! (Actually, the bike is parked at one of the charging stations). They were so ridiculous that we just had to take a picture. The fact that we're expected to share a bike lane with "bicycles" like these is just preposterous (not that I don't agree with public bicycling programs).

By the way, these pictures are not necessarily going to be sequential... Bear with me!

Shane and I figured that we spent as much on ice cream as we spent on restaurant meals in Spain. This is the first of many, many, many ice creams at a Ben & Jerry's in London. Shane and I were walking down the street, having a nice conversation when I stopped mid-sentence, stopped walking dead in my tracks, gasped, and pointed across the street. "Whaaa...?" Shane started to ask, when he followed my finger and saw what I was pointing at. "Good eye!" he squealed as we dashed across the street and ran for the ice cream parlor. Here, I enjoy my spoils.

My first night in London I went out to dinner with the bride-to-be, the groom-to-be, and some of their friends. When we got back to the flat, their flatmate was watching TV. I sat down, and my jaw dropped. "You guys..." I said, "you're never going to believe this, but I grew up with that kid!" Sure enough, there was Simon Bird on the TV screen. His father had a fellowship every summer to teach at Harvard, and he and his brothers and sister used to spend their summers splashing around in the pool with us. He even went to our high school for a year, and there he was on TV talking about pubes and masturbation (neither of which were things that he made a habit of joking about when he was a kid, by the way). What else could I do but take a picture of the TV screen to send home to my mom?

Sitting in Gatwick airport at 6 in the morning waiting for our flight to leave for Paris. I was sitting at a Starbucks, drinking a fully caffeinated coffee. I drank caffeinated coffee the whole time I was in Europe, and now I'm really paying for it. But Starbucks IS great. I no longer have any pretensions about the Americanization of the coffee shop.

France. From above.

My girlfriend did a much better job of packing my bike than I did. When I packed it back up 3 weeks later, it was not nearly as neatly packed, and now I have some fresh dings on my frame (although some may have come from a temper tantrum you'll hear about in the next chapter).

The Paris Opera House at sunset. I listened hard, but didn't hear the Phantom of the Opera. Not even inside my mind.

Being on a budget, we opted to see most of Paris's sights from the outside. This was taken outside the Louvre at night. Anyone who's suffered through the Da Vinci Code will groan when they see this pyramid. On the way home at the end of the trip I picked up Angels and Demons, by the way. Same damned book. Same EXACT fucking book, and the writing was just as bad because it was the SAME DAMNED BOOK! Spare yourselves the pain of reading it twice!
Anyway, the Louvre was beautiful. There is so much gratuitous opulence hanging around Paris, but GOD is it beautiful!

"Alright! We took a picture of it. Now can we move on?!"

This is the nasty bruise I got on my hip from carrying my bike box across London and Paris in one day. The photo really doesn't do the discoloration justice. It got bleached against my glow-in-the-dark skin! I would show you a picture where you can see the bruise better, but I look fat in that one. You get the idea...

"What the hell is that?! It's like a cathedral pooped right in the middle of the street!"

We were pretty excited about this relief in Notre Dame. I call it, "Woman Feels Up Mary."

We were walking around Notre Dame at finishing our Starbucks before we went inside when the bells struck noon. I couldn't help myself. I put on my best Quasimodo voice and moaned "The bells! The bells!" I'm so funny!

This is the Bastille. If you ever go looking for it, don't be fooled. This is it. Mr. European History Major and I went to go see it, and once we got out at the "Bastille" subway stop, we consulted a map to see where it was. We walked round and round. How to read a map was beginning to become a bit of a point of contention, since I had no faith in Shane's ability to do it anymore. Shane: "Where the hell is it?"
Claire: "The map says it's supposed to be right there."
Shane: "But all that's here is a boat dock."
Claire: "Well it looks like it's right fucking there on the map."
Shane: "Whatever, I'm over this. I want to go get some ice cream."
Claire: Begins to get sullen, like losing the fucking Bastille is HER fault. The map says it's RIGHT where that damned dock is.
Claire (the next morning): "Shane, it says here in the tour book that they tore down the Bastille 300 years ago. That's the reason why it's so famous, THEY TORE IT DOWN!" Shouldn't a European History major have known that?
I did NOT lose the Bastille.

That's right, folks! Pope condoms! I'm not quite sure if the message here is that the pope reminds you at the last moment that you're not supposed to have sex, or that you're not supposed to use a condom. Or maybe I'm missing the point entirely?

"Stop! This here is the empire of the dead!" The entrance to the catacombs. This was the only attraction in Paris that Shane and I actually paid money to see. It wasn't what I expected, but it was worth every penny.

I expected to see decomposing corpses on something like book shelves, but what we found were just millions and millions of bones piled on top of each other. They had taken the time to arrange the bones along the path, making walls of femurs with designs made from skulls, held together by mortar. But behind the front row there were just bones piled pell mell to the ceiling and stretching back 10 or 20 feet to the back wall.
A picture taken over the top of one pile of bones.

I know, I know. I just HAD to!

I did not go up the Eiffel Tower. I am very, very, very afraid of heights, and the Eiffel Tower has many, many open spaces to fall through. Some observations about the Eiffel Tower:
1. It's short. Shane and I saw the top of it over some trees and I said, "Is that the Eiffel Tower?" We decided it must be a radio tower because it was too short and industrial looking. But it WAS the Eiffel Tower.
2. It's ugly. I know, I know, you're supposed to think it's great. But come on! It's a giant, brown, iron thing that looks like a radio antenna squatting down for a pee.
3. It's kind of tacky how they light it up at night like a giant billboard or something.
4. It's a death trap. I'm sure of it!

Crotch shot of the Eiffel Tower from underneath. Even though it was shorter than I expected, it was still really frigging tall, and since I have anxiety attacks on the roofs of 8 story buildings, there was NO WAY I was going up this. Still, as with anything that scares me, I was fascinated. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I watched people going up the rickety elevator that went DIAGONALLY (that can't possibly be safe). I watched people wandering around the two observation decks, that looked like one could easily fall off of once the Mystical Maleficent Force that Sucks People Off Buildings started doing its thing. And then I saw the people coming down... STAIRS. And not just any stairs, the wire kind where you can see through them and there are big, gaping holes between the individual steps. Know what happens in those holes? The Mystical Maleficent Force that Sucks People Off Buildings reaches through between the steps, grabs your ankles, and pulls you through. It's a very gruesome death. All this time I'm staring at these people I'm saying over and over to Shane, "There is NO WAY you're getting me to go up that thing! You would have to airlift me off because I would lie down on the floor to increase the surface area of my body touching something solid, hug whatever I could, and refuse to let go!"
"I never once suggested we go up it!" Shane kept pointing out. I didn't even have to go up the damned beast to have an anxiety attack about the vertigo. I was having one right here on terra firma. But come on, look at the picture. Look at all that wide-open space between the iron bars. You could get sucked through ANY ONE of them!

And what do you think "Safe Ice Cream" is?