Au Revoir Paris

As I write this I'm well on my way from Paris to Chamonix. I had a great time in Paris; I can't believe it came and went so quickly! I saw a lot in my four nights there, but it is definitely a city worth revisiting. Now though I've had enough of city life and am looking forward to getting out in the Alps to do some hiking/mountaineering.

The past two days I spent at the Louvre, Musee D'Orsay, Sacre Coeur, Montmarte, and the Luxembourg Gardens. There were some disappointments (Starry Night not being at the Orsay because of renovations) and surprises (drinking Heinikens on the grassy hill at Sacre Coeur overlooking all of Paris with some fantastic people). The Louvre did not disappoint as it is such an impressive, magnanimous structure that you could get lost in for hours with all the different corridors and wings. I no clue how much of the museum I saw in my over four hours there, but I imagine if I returned I would finding a number of things that I missed. Montmarte was a charming area a of town with its quaint streets, colorful store fronts, and relaxed nightlife of getting drinks on the sidewalk bar patios. Throughout I continuously ate "un sandwich du jambon et gruyere" (ham and cheese on a baguette) for lunches and snacks. Overall, one of the things I became most impressed with was the metro, which was a breeze to use and allowed you to almost anywhere in the city reliably and quickly. I could get used to life in Paris pretty quickly I think.

Writing in both my journal and this blog brought back a lot of memories from my previous trips to Paris with my family so many years ago and trying to write about it as my first exercise in travel writing in first grade. I had the task of completing a travel story as an assignment so I choose one particular trip to Paris. Each day we had the task of first writing this story in a lined notebook and once we had that completed we had to type in on one of those prehistoric computers that used floppy discs. I managed to drag out a 3 day trip into some 60 odd pages simply by writing roughly 9 words per 8.5 x 11" piece of paper thinking the longer the story was the cooler I would be. Obviously, that worked out. This of course extended weeks beyond the original assignment and I barely got started typing the thing on the computer at all. One thing I've always questioned from that is how I ever got graded. In the end I always look back at that ridiculousness as my first foray into travel writing that helps me remember some of the trips I have taken.

So I tried out a new pose inside the Louvre. Since this is a family friendly blog I kept it PG.



Normally, I haven't been too into sculpture as a medium, but while at the Louvre I was really impressed by their marble statue collection. I spent a lot of time in these galleries and had a little fun with it taking pictures of statues that look like people I know. Who might this be?(maybe a little longer hair in the sculpture) Guess in the comment section.



Finally a picture outside the Louvre.