Paris; City of Unknown Smells and many stairs

This was our first ride on an overnight train and we had fun with it. We started at the bar car with some wine and then retired to our cabin at the Milan stop to get ready for the long ride. It was beautiful pulling out of Venice as well.

Our arrival in Paris on the Venice-<->Paris night train was relatively uneventful. I personally awoke a bit ahead of schedule as we made our first stop in Dijon 4 hours out of Paris; no matter, it was a pretty ride and we actually slept quite well in the night. 
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Unfortunately we didn't have a shower or anything like that but remembering our first trip to Paris we weren't too worried. After some teeth brushing in our little sink, a lot of fabreeze, and some freshening up we stepped out into the city. We were immediately greeted by that bouquet of aroma that would easily cover our travel weary selves. Venice has nothing on Paris in the realm of stink, in fact I dare say I've never been anywhere that does.

I know Lauren and I are both always very down on Paris and we tried really hard to give it a second chance. Our first encounter with a Parisian didn't really help the deal though as our waitress in the bar car was from Paris and understood our problem; telling us she hated it and had bought a home in Switzerland to get out of it. Soldiering on we headed for our hotel; the same awesome one as last time. Amazingly the metro was clean (ish) and we suddenly realized the French Open was in town and the dogs were cheating by cleaning up the city for the extra tourists... We even saw a man scrubbing the sidewalk at the Arc d'triumph, something we never saw before.

After getting our stuff secure in the hotel we started sightseeing, and climbing stairs. Both are things that never, ever end in this city. 

Over the next two days (arrival day and today) we saw many sites. Some of them I got a snap of on the iPhone which I posted above, others we will add to the Flickr feed later. To name a few we revisited the Army Museum/Napoleon's Tomb, The Louvre, the park alongside the Eiffel Tower, and many more. The Eiffel elevators were broken and given the amount of stairs involved you can probably understand our hesitance to revisit it... Speaking of stairs, this city is awash with them. Let me highlight some of them for you:

Broken by the way, so this still counts.

My butt is going to look amazing if I ever make it down from the stairs. Among those you may notice some particularly long spiral stairs: we finally made it up the Arc d'triumph which was spectacular, if tiring.

We also revisited the Louvre today which we said we would never do; and though we didn't get stuck between construction sections this time the AC didn't seem to be working at full power which wasn't helping the already tough nasal atmosphere of the city.

We saw many other sites which I am not the most qualified to mention as they all revolved around modern art which I cannot talk about for more than one run-on sentence without venturing into a long argument about how chairs and paint splatter are neither hard to make or "art." Either way one of the buildings was the Pompidou Centre which was cool enough to distract me from the epic amounts of waisted time placed into the "art" within for at least 2 minutes. 

 


We probably won't have another post as the wifi here is hard to find and we will be home soon. This trip was truly great, but just like our first European trip; Paris is a good city to visit if you want to make yourself wish you were back home (or anywhere else really).

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