Almost 2 months ago my parents came to visit me and when they left, I was stuck with the countdown for my girlfriend to arrive. My parents presence was a very good feeling and although I felt obligated to play tour guide for just over a week, I truly enjoyed their company. Their departure meant that I needed to wait for just over a month before my girlfriend would be here and this was really the most important thing to me. So the time between these two events was scattered with depression and solitude. Like I said before, I will not share these memories with you and hope that you'll understand that 6000 miles can alter ones perception of relationship and that's more than enough information.
I was facing directly the end of my mind, when she arrived on the 15th of November and I spent the following 2 weeks in my own little world with her. The blog you read here has taken some time to come to terms with. I believe that the time she was in my arms lasted forever, and once she had gone I began counting down the days until I could leave this place and return to her. Only now that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel , so to speak, is the realization setting in that I've sent myself into this state almost entirely on my own. I'll try to express the joy I was feeling previous to the rest of the emotions. There was a sense of invulnerability that was immediately replaced by helplessness, safety replaced with anxiety, and so on...
I had planed out a significant whirlwind tour for Marisa and I to embark on for 7 days. We would fly from Munich to Paris, Paris to Milan, Milan to Rome, and finally from Rome back to Munich. It sounds fun right....see it all as fast as possible...hmm, OK. In hind sight it probably should have been extended or slowed to some extent, but it was quite the experience.
We arrived in Paris on sunday the 18th and set on our way. Practically the entire rail network of France was on strike (typically French, from what I hear) when we arrived, so we took a cab from the airport to our hotel on the edge of the Bastille. To save some of the explanation behind our exhausting route, I've mapped out our foot path which lasted from 10 am until 7 pm. We walked nearly 15 miles. We went for broke and paid dearly for it the rest of the trip, but we saw nearly every major tourist destination in the city center. Click the link to check out our route.
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1500067
We saw Notre Dame, the Eifel Tower, Victor Hugo's mansion, and so on, and so on. I'll post the pictures from this day in their entirety in a second. The city was truly a beautiful one, but I must be honest and say that it did not really meet my expectations. The architecture was very attractive and unique from all of the other cities that I've seen in Europe, but practically every building in Paris looked the same. The shear amount of things that we saw in one day nearly killed my motivation for the following day, but this actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I was so turned off of seeing the tourist spots on the second day that our meandering pace made for a great experience in Paris.
I almost forgot, here's day one. Abridged of course.
So the second day we woke up to a very interesting sight...French state police on horses. Apparently the train strikes had led other civil workers to believe that their jobs deserved more recognition than their pay dictates, so they went on strike too. One thing that happens more often France, specifically Paris, is demonstrations.
People routinely take to the streets to voice their opinion, often with the results you would expect from a simple equation: Throw massive amounts of people in the streets of one of the largest cities in Europe, add an equally impressive number of police, multiply that by a factor of the government's propensity to fear revolution, and you get results. Imagine what would happen if the American public wasn't afraid of it's government's actions, a public that wasn't afraid of the all too eager and too under-trained police force patrolling their towns. Imagine an American public that could stand up for what they wanted without making a victim of themselves.
I seem to be getting off topic.
Our second day was planned to be spent wandering the Louvre. A real dream of mine and really (don't tell my girlfriend) the only thing that specifically interested me in the city. We hitched a cab around the corner form the hotel. Marisa has a much better understanding of the French language than I do of German, so she told the driver that, "We would like to go to the Louvre, please." The Driver responded, "Yes, it was a perfect day to go to the Louvre." It was raining mildly. The streets were wet and rather uncrowded. It really was a perfect day to visit the Louvre. A perfect day to visit any museum, let alone the most prolific collection of art in the world.
Only after I had paid the cab 12 euro; only after Marisa and I had walked around the building, only after I had read the soggy sign on the front of the pyramid did I realize that the cab drivers perceived good hearted nature was really a smug little misleading gesture towards two obvious tourists. The louvre was closed. The largest, most famous house of art was closed? How could this be? Pardon my French...
FUCK.
My heart sank into my stomach, sank into m feet. I swirled down the drain with the dripping ink from the sign that was so clearly printed on the door to my destination. I got a nice picture of the facade of the building and turned around. My girlfriend could instantly sense my disappointment. She grabbed my hand as we turned away. Optimistically, Marisa said that we'll just have to come back to Paris in the future. This is why she's mine.The remainder of the the day played out perfectly in tune with the weather and atmosphere of the city. Having seen the vast majority of tourist destinations the day previous, we had only one thing left on our list...to pay tribute to one James Morrison. His buried across town but rather easy to get to, had the trains not been on strike, but we had walked so much the day before that we thought sitting in a subway station for a half hour to catch an over crowded train would not be so bad.
In just under an hour we exited the train and meandered through the cemetery in search for the Door's front man. There we found him and a few others resting in peace.
So we actually wandered around the cemetery for more than a few hours. It was utterly fascinating. So many people that had lived in Paris some 300 years prior to our arrival. It was a creepy trip down memory lane, especially when we noticed this grave that appeared to have been opened.
And if you know me well enough to know that I have a soft spot for Zombies, then you would also know that I spent a large portion of the rest of the time in the cemetery looking for them. I had no luck with this venture, and Marisa and I both decided, along with the nuisance of the attendants constantly speaking in French and pointing to the gates, it was time to go. Zombieless, and now in the cold, wet, dark of the Pere Lachaise Cemetry, we headed to the gates to resume life with the living.
One of the best parts of my recent education and employment has been that I have had the opportunity to meet and work along side many different people from different parts of the globe. At RTT Munich, I met Clement Hoffner. A native of france who studied car design in Paris before getting hired by RTT. He returned to Paris to start up the future French office of the company, so we planned on meeting up when I arrived in his city. Again the trains had hindered this plan a bit, but Marisa and I had a wonderful french meal in the hip Bastille neighborhood while we waited for his return to the city. Marisa even got her french onion soup, which not surprisingly, is just onion soup in France. We even were fortunate enough to sample some of 2007's, just released, Beaujolais-nouveau.
Clement met us near by and we followed him down a small street that really felt super hip. It was where we had been looking for the night previous, but we passed it up while on the metro. We enjoyed some cocktails and conversation before retiring for the night. We had blasted through Paris in 2 long days and had to catch a plane to Italy in the early part of the next day.
