Paris, Day 1: Don’t scream “LEE!” at large groups of Asians

I know I said I was going to write about the rest of the Austria trip, but I got distracted by the pretty lights of Paris. I will tell you about the catastrophe/amazingness that was the rest of the Austria trip… eventually. But I was already starting to forget about Paris, so we’ll just see how long I can keep you in suspense on that particular adventure.

It was obvious from day one that the Paris trip was going to be of the GO! GO! GO! variety. Leeanne handed us all printed itineraries the day before we left of what we should go see when. This was awesome, because it meant we got to see everything worth seeing in the 3 short days available to us. Except Versailles and juggling, fire breathing tightrope walkers. But those guys are hard to come by nowadays, what with the economy and all.

P.S. My debit card didn’t work the whole trip, so just imagine me being completely broke in one of the most expensive cities in the world throughout the duration of this trip.

Meet the characters:
You met Leeanne, Megan, Laura, Eric, and especially Mikey in The Churro Incident. And Megan and Laura were also both on the Austria trip. But for some reason I wrote small novels on everyone again anyway. Enjoy.

Leeanne: This trip’s organizer. A huge fan of Moulin Rouge and The Phantom of the Opera, she almost melted into a puddle of joy in front of the real life Moulin Rouge and opera house. Leeanne is very good at counting stairs. Inexplicably, Leeanne does not like Nutella.

Mikey: Self-proclaimed shopaholic with a penchant for over packing, darting into oncoming traffic and inadvertently offending large groups of minorities, though usually not all at the same time.

Megan McDonie: Megan reprised her role as wind-up toy, and was also our group’s official lag-behind-and-photograph-random-cool-things member. A good number of the photos in my slideshows were stolen from her camera. And everybody else’s, because mine’s been tweaking out ever since Milan.

Eric: Eric is prone to intermittently proclaiming that French people are weird, usually while in the middle of large groups of French people. Since 2/3 of the population understands at least some English, this also meant Eric intermittently put our faces in grave danger of being punched.

Maria: Maria’s Spanish is supermegaincredible. This possibly has something to do with her being born and raised in Mexico. Maybe. She often skips off to pose for pictures in front of famous monuments without warning.

Laura: Laura reprised her role as fearless navigator, having done a superb job of leading us around in Austria. I reprised my role as the person who lags behind all the time getting distracted by trees and shiny objects, so I only saw Laura from a distance a lot of the trip.

Jamie: Hailing from Georgia, Jamie somehow managed to come from the South without a trace of the Southern belle accent. Jaime likes wearing wonderful hats. Jaime does not like getting run over by cars. Ironically, she started this adventure by almost getting run over at the bus stop.

Mary: A good friend of Mikey and Leeanne’s studying in France. She loves crepes, cats and Nutella. She does not love cat nutella crepes. Mary, like Mikey, not only often dashes into, but often leads our entire group into oncoming traffic, much to Jamie’s dismay.

Notre Dame: No hunchbacks, briefly lost
As soon as we touched down in France we beelined it to our hostel, with the somewhat unsettling name of Oops Hostel, and dropped of all our bags. Then we walked to Notre Dame. Traveling with 8 can be tricky, and we got separated from each other on the way there, but we all found each other again thanks to Eric’s obnoxiously orange backpack, glowing like the lumpy beacon on a lighthouse with a short-cropped haircut. That’s gonna happen a lot. (Us getting separated, I mean. And the off-kilter analogies will probably happen a lot too.)

On the way: On this bridge, Le Pont des Arts, couples from all over the world have written their names on locks and thrown the keys in the river. The French government removed them all May 2010, so I think this is only about one and a half years’ worth, beleive it or not.

Notre Dame was pretty inside, but I noticed a distinct lack of hunchbacks. I’ve been spoiled; the roof of Notre Dame is really cool, but I thought the interior was just kind of typical-cathedral levels of cool. And it’s really dark in there; they went a little crazy with the mood lighting.

I wish I’d seen the Disney movie, or maybe read the book about the hunchback of Notre Dame. I probably would’ve appreciated the place more. And now I’m also really curious how the hunchback got around without ever stubbing his face on anything with all that mood lighting going on. Or maybe he didn’t, judging by his face. …That wasn’t very nice. I take it back. Sorry, inanimate animated character from the 90s. Anyway, we got separated from each other and half of us spent a good while standing by the entrance while the other half contemplated the mysteries of the universe. That’s gonna happen a lot on this trip too. Naturally, since there are a lot mysteries of the universe out there to contemplate. Like why the moon looks huge one night and teeny tiny the next. And why everything you haven’t eaten before and someone else has inevitably tastes like chicken.

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Crepes, Nutella and Mary
After that we met up with Mary, Mikey and Leeanne’s friend from back in the sates who’s studying abroad in France this semester. Mary loves cats. She took us to a wonderful little crepe shop that served everything from strawberry crepes to Nutella-coconut. They were incredible; like potatoless hot fried lefse on steroids for anyone from Minnesota, or like very thin and delicious pancakes for everyone who has no idea what lefse is. If you’ve always assumed it was some sort of Indian head decoration, you’re pretty far off. I had an eggs, ham and cheese crepe and a sugar and cinnamon crepe. It was about as healthy as it sounds; the sugar and cinnamon, all rolled up together inside the crepe, melted to a sweet molten liquid, and need to quit writing about this or I’m going to drool on Antonia’s nice apartment.

Upper right: ham, eggs and cheese crepe
Lower left: Nutella/Pure Deliciousness crepe. Even better than the cinnamon and sugar one.

The Louvre is big
What’s up with French spelling? I’d have guessed the museum would be spelled Louve, or maybe Loove. But silent R, really? Louvre. If you say it phonetically you sound like you’re trying to say “lovely” while gargling a mouthful of marbles. Or with a cat hanging from your tongue. Actually, that would probably just sound like “NLAAAHG!”

But back to the Louve-ray. It was amazing. There are about 35,000 works of art in the Louvre. The oft-quoted stat: if you spent 30 seconds looking at each work of art, you’d be in there for over almost 2 weeks. This is assuming you did not eat or sleep at any point, and you somehow always evaded security when the museum was supposed to close while simultaneously staring at a new piece of art every 30 seconds without ever going ADD. So basically, it would actually take you more like a month and a half, unless you’re a ninja-robot, which is doubtful. However, if you spent 250 milliseconds on each painting, you’d only have to sprint through the Louvre like your pants were on fire for 6 hours straight. Nobody else in the group was too excited about this idea. Which was good, because we all probably would’ve gotten tackled by security eventually, and Parisian holding cells have never been on my top 10 for things to do in Paris. At least not on this first trip. Maybe someday.

My attempt to convey how overwhelming the Louvre was. Everything shown here is way less than 0.2% of all the works in the museum. (Click the picture to embiggen.)

Even the museum itself is a work of art. The ceilings are painted in elaborate murals, there are sculptures built into the walls, and the whole place extends for 652,300 square feet. That’s about 40 acres for the farmers, or 11 football fields for everyone who’s seen a football field.

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The Mona Lisa is awesome
I didn’t even know how much I’d been looking forward to seeing the Mona Lisa until we were in front of it. The exhibit was crazy. They rope the crowd off about 20 feet from the painting, and you have to elbow through an ever-present crowd of gawkers to get a look at it. But it was a really surreal sensation to get to see it, even if I was crammed up to about 6 other people and had to make a valient effort to evade the armpit of the camera-touting guy next to me.

Most people say the Mona Lisa is smaller than they expected. In fact, so many people said this to me before my trip that I was expecting her to be about 2 inches tall. In reality it’s 2 and a half feet by 2 feet, which was absolutely gigantic after my I’m-gonna-have-to-bring-binoculars mental image. It was one of two times on this trip I got a strong dose of the “I’m actually in Paris looking at real live stuff I only ever thought I’d see pictures of” feeling. It’s a pretty crazy feeling, kind of like dreaming except you don’t wake up or suddenly realize you’ve been walking around in your undershorts all day and no one thought to tell you. Or does that not happen in your dreams?

What I thought I looked like while I was looking at the Mona Lisa

What I actually looked like.

Major comic highlight of the trip for me: meanwhile, at the other end of the Mona Lisa exhibit… Mikey, who was looking for Leeanne, shouted, “LEE!” Loudly. In front of a large group of Asians. Lee happens to be the most common surname in China, Korea and Vietnam. The whole group turned around with an inquisitive “Yes? You called?” look. Mikey blinked and managed an, “Oh! I’m so sorry!” And they all bowed. Very polite and understanding, the Lees.

Another excellent way to spend ridiculous amounts of time in the Louvre, other than looking at every piece of art for 30 seconds, is to inadvertently split your 1 group of 8 people into 2 groups of 4 people. Then have both groups believe the other group went in the opposite direction of which they actually went. For long-lasting effects, ensure group 1 has two phones and group 2 has no phones. (I told you we did this a lot.) At least we all lost each other in the biggest museum in the world, so there was a lot to distract us from the fact that we were lost.

After a long, half-hearted search that mostly involved ogling over Venus and wondering through endless Greek sculpture exhibits, our group gave up and went to the entrance… and instantly found the other group, who had been waiting there patiently for a very long time.

Roasted duck
From there we wandered to a restaurant. The menu was all in French—imagine that—so I had to excuse myself from the table to stand outside and read the English menu they’d posted on the front door. As soon as I went back and sat down I forgot what I’d wanted to order and had to do it all over again. I ended up getting roast duck. Surprisingly, it did not taste like chicken, at least not exactly. It tasted more like what steak would taste like if steak tasted like chicken. Or maybe what chicken would taste like if chicken tasted like steak. It was delicious either way.

It took me a second to figure out that wasn’t a whole duck. For a few moments I just thought I had been served a horribly deformed meal.

We met up with Mary again for hot chocolate in a nice little restaurant with a good view of the Eiffel tower off in the distance. The hot chocolate in France is the real stuff. They pour hot, liquid chocolate into the bottom of your mug and dilute it with milk. It blows Nesquick out of the water.

Awkward moments in the metro
Another comic highlight of the trip: we decided to take the metro back to our hostal for the first time in this country. After my prolonged puzzlement in Madrid much earlier this trip, I was relieved to see I’m not the only one occasionally befuddled by the workings of the metro. Leeanne tried to get change from the change machine. It didn’t work. Primarily because the change machine was a condom dispenser. I do not know why they need a condom dispenser in the middle of the metro, but I do know Leeanne will never live that down.

We figured out our metro woes eventually, arrived back at Oops and slept like pollos muertos. Dead chickens, as they say in Spanish. Well, I actually got locked out of the room and couldn’t knock loud enough to wake up all the dead chickens already asleep in the room, so I had to go beg the suspicious receptionist for another key. But then I slept like a dead chicken.

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The Paris Trip, Day 2. …coming soon. Austria Trip, Part 2 also coming soonishly.