Paris

Last weekend, we went to Paris. We left early early Saturday morning and came back very late Tuesday night. It was a good, but overwhelming break. First, in that time, we almost filled my 2 gig memory card!! That is right, we took a bit over 1,300 pictures on my camera alone! I think that is more than we took the 9 days we were in Italy. Since the museums and churches allowed pictures, we took a lot there. I will start posting pictures in the next couple days since I am still rotating them and haven't downloaded John's camera yet.

Paris was overwhelming as a city. It felt very metropolitan to me even though it is clearly a very old city. It has wide streets that were often busy. Car traffic was heavy, as was pedestrian traffic. Yet, there were places that had narrow paths that you could wander and had very few people. The scale of the city was also overwhelming. It doesn't look that big on a map but the buildings are massive and it does take a while to walk places. The Louvre. The Arc De Triumph, Notre Dame, Versailles. All massive places.

For being a huge tourist destination, it often didn't feel like it. That I liked. A few people approached us and spoke French to us, expecting us to understand. We didn't. They seemed annoyed when I said, "No Francois." Menus also often weren't in English. This I really liked. We were generally able to figure out what things where and it added to the adventure of travelling to a new place.

Another thing happened that that is overwhelming but exciting, but I'll post more on that later.