e u r o b l o g

So I wrote this great entry last night about Paris, but you’ll never see it–the computer deleted it. Ergh.

Here is a brief summary:

1. Yesterday we walked for a really long time–from our hotel on the northern outskirtsish of Paris all the way down to the Champs Elysees. For the record, it is a three-hour walk or a fifteen-minute train ride. We then went back to the hotel (after obtaining my FedEx package and briefly visiting a free museum in a huge building, ironically called the Petit Palais) and slept for a really long time.

2. That night we took the metro down to the Eiffel Tower (by which I mean we took the metro halfway, then the line we needed was closed, so we walked really far again). For reasons I no longer recall (though I suspect they were money-related) we decided to walk up the tower. After all, we’re young and spry–or at least young. Basically, the stairs killed us (except Steph) and by the time we’d made it to the second level (about 530 steps later) they had closed down the elevator to the top.

Now, I have to be honest here. I hate heights, so by the time we were barely halfway up, the combination of terror, asthma, and a billion steps was not working for me. Incidentally, the only thing I hate more than tall buildings?

Elevators, of course.

So, though I understand that seeing the view of Paris would have been very cool, um, I was really not devastated. You could maybe say that I was ecstatic, actually–I didn’t have to go to the top of that tower, and I avoided looking like a wimp. It was perfect.

3. In case we didn’t have enough stairs yesterday, today we went to Notre Dame and went up in the tower, which also has roughly 57893 steps.

What I have determined from the last two days: There are more stairs in Paris alone than there are in the entire United States.

And we have walked up all of them.

Plus, by the time we got to Notre Dame, we’d already walked around the Louvre (a.k.a. the biggest building, ever) and to Saint-Chapelle, which might be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen–the walls are almost all stained-glass, but the amount of iron makes them look really heavy and thick. Until the light comes in, anyway–and then the entire chapel is illuminated. It’s amazing.

After Notre Dame we visited Madame Fain’s shop–something our high school French teacher talked about all the time. Madame Fain was very nice and remembered our teacher. Her shop was really odd: a curious mixture of postcards, tennis balls, mini Eiffel Towers, and, um, a lightsaber.

We walked from there to Centre Pompidou, where we looked at a lot of modern art that I mostly didn’t understand, and read a really great poem by Jenny Holzer called “Blur.” We burned out pretty quickly, though, and had dinner and then went back to the hotel around 8:30.

We walked up the three flights of stairs to our room, and then my legs knew for sure that my theory was correct.

–Amanda

It didn’t aid my sleep though, so I put on the relaxation channel, which sounded like those nature sounds tapes they used to sell all over the place–the ones with the sample station. As a kid I had one of whale migration noises…or maybe it was mating noises; I don’t remember.

The bus ride from Manchester to London was uneventful–at least I think so; I slept through most of it.

Then there was the bus from London to Luton. Our driver was INSANE. He started off the trip by making it his personal mission to anger every passenger or potential passenger who walked by; then, he was a terrible driver, which I chalked up to mere familiarity or possibly city-driver aggression–until he HIT somebody. It took about twenty minutes to clear that up, and we were worried we would miss our flight, but that was dumb. Obviously, our flight was delayed two hours, so we spent a looong time sitting around in Luton, and then once we got to Paris, the metro had stopped running so we had to take a cab. It is a very good thing Steph can say more in French than the rest of us can (I, for example, can tell people my name and name a few articles of clothing and some animals. It is not useful knowledge.

–Amanda