Before riot happy time!All was well again and the New Year came in happily and then Paris did what it does best: riot. There were riot police trying to contain crowds of people throwing champagne bottles and arresting people and evacuating wounded officers and all sorts of craziness (below is a quick video of us after we've left the riot. If your interested in the longer, more crazy/scandalous ones, let me know individually)…
somehow (before this video was shot) we had landed ourselves right in the middle of it. The police we kept on running into immediately knew we were tourists and kept on suggesting that we get the hell out of there.
We obliged. It was a good night but Betty and Jessie had to leave the next day (after more sight seeing like the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dam and whatnot), traveling elsewhere, while Rachel and I stayed to conquer Paris.
Christmas card photo #2
!!!
Christmas card photo #3...
We went to an amazing graveyard of artists in central Paris. Here, Oscar Wilde. But, by far, my favorite thing was this...
THIS. hahahahahaha... happy now, Marx?Over the next few days, Rachel and I lived in museums, visiting the Rodin, Louvre, D’Orsay, and Pompidou. Everything was fantastic and unbelievable except for the Louvre. Apparently spending six hours looking at orthodox, realist paintings is not really my thing… Where’s the art? I mean, it was cool to check off the box for the Louvre and Mona Lisa, but… eh. The Rodin museum was absolutely fantastic and the craziest sculpture I’ve ever seen. Rachel was reborn at the Pompidou, and I liked it a lot, except for that Ready Made art shit. boo. By far though, the most incredible was the Musée D’Orsay, an old railway station converted into a pre, during and post Impressionist museum (that’s it… nothing else). Holy shit. Amazing.
Rodin!
D'Orsay = best museum in existence
Back to the Louvre for the (much less cool) inside
booooooooo (Ready Made in Pompidou).The two of us were pretty much shameless tourists, stopping in for pastries every few blocks in good neighborhoods, going to that intellectual’s coffeehouse district (we drank hot chocolate…. don’t tell anyone…), posing with a baguette at the Bastille roundabout (actually, I don’t think that’s that common…) and going the Pantheon (leave it to the French to redesign their most monumental church as a monument to the French Revolution… that place was incredible). We tried to go to the catacombs (coolest thing ever in Vienna) but they were closed…
mmmmm-mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
disappointingly didn't make me any smarter...
WE JUST FELT LIKE HOT CHOCOLATE, OKAY???
ummmmmm, amazingly unflattering but... amazing... how revolutionary do we look? (and, no, i don't know why we're posing as rioters and we already have bread...)
Pantheon
scale.
Rou-fucking-sseau!
subway
THE most important staircase in the world... and I'll never forgive the French for blocking it off and not letting me get a picture... ever.We were pretty tight on money at this point and we had a few truly pathetic moments. Among them, well, as I said, Rachel and I had lost our luggage and only had the clothes we wore on our bodies, so we got some more and at H&M sale, but not much, and by the time we got to Paris our rags (literally, my shirt sleeve had ripped when lifting luggage) had acquired a rather unpleasant odor, so after Betty and Jessie left it was time to venture out. Rachel had some pajamas, so one morning she took all our clothes except those to the laundromat (which ended up, apparently being the trip to hell to find detergent without knowing how to speak French) and the idea was to make it back before we had to check out of our budget hotel (somehow cheaper than hostels? It actually was really, really nice though and they brought the "breakfast" to our bed, though I'm not sure if they're offering extra services at this place or some of the staff also works at the Cabaret shows or what, because at four in the morning this woman, scantily clad in a sort of perverted maid's uniform with four inch heels unlocked our door at four in the morning, asked us some unknown questions in French and then left... ????). Anyway, she came back at checkout time without my clothes (thanks to the detergent debacle the clothes had just started the washing cycle) and it was time to check out… after laughing hysterically at my pathetic state of being at this budget hotel in the middle of the Paris Red Light District (cheap), I assembled what little clothing I had and wore my rag of a busted sweater over my chest, boxer shorts, a coat wrapped around the backside of my legs in a vain attempt to cover up the fact that I was wearing rather small boxers and hiking boots (the shoes I had worn on the plane because they were the heaviest to put in the bags). Like this, I walked down busy Paris streets to the laundromat, half amused, half willing nonexistence. Photos available upon request.
