Author: jason

Tuesday morning I got up 4am, sat around and whined for a few minutes and then packed up all my shit and headed for the train station. I had a ticket for 5:12am to Dresden. I stopped at Zoo Station to drop off my backpack in a locker, cause I knew there were some there but wasn’t sure if there were any at Hbf and then I headed to Hbf for my train.

My train trip to Dresden was broken into two trains. The first was a standard S-Bahn (all these terms will be defined when I finish the Berlin post, sorry) and the second was a passenger train, which was a new one for me.

The passenger train turned out to be like what you see in Harry Potter. Each car has 10 or so compartments with a door that closes and each holds 6 people. The train was fairly empty so I was able to snatch my own compartment. I noticed that there was a window that would go down, so I pulled it down and that’s when the trouble set in.

The train started moving and I was sititng with my arms on the window and my face in the wind enjoying the cool morning air. After about 5 or 10 minutes by eyes started to itch and my nose started running. Just alergies, which I have all the time, so no big deal. A few minutes later I was writhing around on the seat in pain. This was a whole new type of alergies. My face swelled up, and I got little red raised spots in a few places. My throat swelled and I was having trouble breathing and my eyes were bright red and felt like they were coated with sandpaper. I thought I was going to die on the train to Dresden.

I went down to the bathroom and spent about 10 minutes flushing my face, eyes and nose with water and it started to slack off some. For the rest of the trip I was still miserable but it got better and better as we went along. I even laid down and got 30 minutes of sleep, or so.

I arrived in Dresden around 8am and started looking for a map. English was basically non-existant, even in the station, where I’ve usually had decent luck. I found a map at the newspaper store and set out.

Dresden is a very small city, at least compared to where I’ve been in the last few weeks. I walked pretty quickly through the old town (Altstadt) and into the new town (Nuestadt) and saw some pretty amazing stuff. I didn’t consult the map very much cause it was cool out and I was just enjoying the walk. The old and new towns are seperated by a river, with three main bridges. I had crossed the main bridge out of town and decided to walk down along the river’s edge to get to the next one and head back.

I ended up walking along the river for a long, long way. I’m not sure how long but I passed the bridge by far and started getting into a less city like area. Started to get worn out so I found a bench and just chilled out for a half hour or so before starting to walk back. Everything was still very quiet and it was very nice to be away from the insanity of a big city for a change.

I headed back towards town, and eventually made it to the bridge I was going to cross. I noticed that there was a tram running and I spent about 15 minutes figuring out where it went and how to buy a ticket. I wanted to get back to the station to get some food, and then set out into the old town again. That’s where many of the monuments and buildings stood that were destroyed in the war.

You can get a complete history of Dresden from Wikipedia, but basically it was a very busy industrial city with a ton of beautiful baroque architecture and in 1945 the Allies firebombed it to the ground. Since then much has been rebuilt or repaired, and usually in the same style. It was hard for me to tell what was old and what was new, but it was all beautiful.

I got back to the station, had a snack, and set back out. I had passed through old town quickly earlier and wanted to spent more time exploring. Check out the pictures for all the details. It’s a beautiful city, and there’s a lot to see. I’d like to spend more time there to see the museums but I only had about 6 hours total before I had to head back to Berlin.

I was getting to where I was pretty worn out, so I found a bench in the shade and took a long nap. I needed it. I was running on 2 hours of sleep and several days of hard core walking around giant cities. The nap refreshed me and I wandered around the sights for an hour or so before I had to head back for my train.

My two high speed trains back to Berlin was uneventful, and relaxing. Once I got back to Berlin I ran over to Zoo, got my bag, and then found a train to the airport, which took forever. There were 17 stops and we waited a few minutes at each one for some reason. Long train.

The airport was wayyy outside of Berlin. It’s not their main one, and I think it only served the cheap airlines. My flight was delayed by about an hour and a half but aside from that everything went fine. I met a really nice Polish girl named Dominika in the terminal and we chatted while waiting for the plane. She’s studying at Oxford to be an architecht and wanted to hear all about my travels in Europe. We had a nice talk, and ended up sitting together on the plane. She was very embarassed about her English but I assured her it was a sound for sore ears. Was nice to have someone to talk to during the long wait, and the flight.

Eventually I was in London! People were speaking English! I could read everything! Man, it was so nice. Unfortunately, with the plane being delayed, I was a little screwed on transportation. The Underground stops running at midnight and it was 1am before I got out of the airport. I got a train from the airport into central London and then was going to plan to catch a bus. Happily, there was a cab driver looking for fares in the station so I blew some money and had him take me right to the hostel.

So, Dresden was very nice, even though I had just a whirlwind tour. I think it would have helped a lot if I had someone who knew German with me. I really couldn’t communicate at all there but at least I feel like I was able to see some of the sights in the short time I had. It was a nice side trip, and better than spending another day boiling in Berlin 🙂

I’ve posted pictures from Dresden on Flickr that you should really check out. It’s an incredible city to see.

I’m wrapping up my second full day in London. I’m a little sad to report that I think I am burned out on sightseeing. I really didn’t do too much today. I had a little bit of time to blow before I could check into my new hotel so I decided to walk up to Lord’s Cricket Ground. I don’t know anything about Cricket or anything, but that place features quite a bit in the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I just kinda wanted to see it. Unfortunately you couldn’t really get it and see anything. It’s a stadium type place. So, I took a picture of the sign and walked back 🙂

After I got checked into my hotel I spent some time trying to find Internet access with no luck. Eventually I went down and asked and found they didn’t have any. So, I went searching for an Internet cafe. I found one just down the street that is pretty nice and that’s where I am now. (Again)

For the sights, today, I decided to head back to London Tower and Tower Bridge because they both looked pretty interesting. This is where the burn out started. I saw the London Tower, and took a few pics but I didn’t really want to go wander around inside. I took the Tower Bridge tour cause I wanted to see the “engine room” but it was all faked up and mocked up cause instead of a giant steam plant and hydraulics now they use electric motors that are probably the size of my thumb. Granted, I have a sausage thumb.

And… that was pretty much it. I went back to my hotel and watched a little TV and now I’m here typing this. Tomorrow I’m going to attempt to take the train and bus to see Stonehenge, which I’ve always wanted to see. That will probably take the bulk of the day as it’s at least 2 hours of travel in each direction. Then it’s Saturday and I’ll be coming home!

This trip has been a lot of fun, and I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve seen a ton. I’ve been to five countries: The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and England and explored 7 cities: Amsterdam, Breda, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Dresden and London and I’m worn the fuck out. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends, and riding my bike and planning my next trip 🙂

I’m glad I did it this way, even though it was kind of rushed and messy. I know where I’d like to go back and spend more time, and I have a much better idea of what is out there. Kelly used to tease me cause I was so clueless on geography. Well I’m not now. I know a good part of Europe pretty well and I can tell you how to get around it cheaply. That’s good stuff to know.

I definitely want to go back to Amsterdam with friends. I’d like to see much more of Germany, but with someone who speaks German and I very much want to be there on a motorcycle. I want to come back to England for a much longer visit and be mobile. London is great, but I want to see the countryside and castles and such. I’m going to need a driver though, cause the driving on the left still freaks me out.

So, that’s it for today, I think. I forgot my camera back at the hotel so I’ll post today’s pictures tomorrow, or later if I come back down here.

I’ve made a real mess of my front page, but it’s hard to keep things in order when your life is utterly chaotic. This living on the road deal has been interesting, and surprising, and all manner of new things, but it makes for keeping things in order difficult!

And that’s all my complaining for the day, because it’s time to talk about London.

London is wonderful. I love it here and I want to stay.

People are nice, the city is full of beauty and history, the weather is very agreeable (so far) and they speak my language. There’s a ton of things to do, and I’ve not even really scratched the surface. Just the posters pasted in the Underground of all the live shows coming up are enough to make me want to burn my passport and move in.

Enough gushing.

The first thing I did was head to The Undeground and figure out where I was going to go. I noticed a tourist booth so I went there and booked a new hotel for my last two days. 2 stars, right down the street from Paddington Station and GB 50 a night. Not bad.

I started by picking a random place on the map and going there. Hyde Park sounded cool, and Speakers Corner sounded interesting, so I headed that way on the Underground (hereafter, The U) and got there easily. When I arrived I wandered around in cirlces for a bit and noticed a sign that said Buckingham Palace. That sounded pretty good so I started walking and before long I was watching the royal guards prancing around like idiots. Idiots with submachine guns, but idiots none the less. I’m sorry, but they really look quite silly. I took a video for you but it’s huge… actually, this net access is fast. Lemme see if I can send it up.

Please wait.

Hermm… 15 minutes to upload. Okay, we’ll give it a try. I need to recompress the video cause it’s 70MB but this’ll do for now.

Anyway, I saw the guards and their silly dance, and I wandered around Buckingham Palace, which was cool. Eventually I made it back to where I had started and noticed a red open top bus for touring standing there and thought I’d check it out. For GB 20 I could take a hop on hop off 2 hour+ tour and get a free boat ride out of the deal. Sounded better than walking. I hopped on the bus and it turned out to be really fun. The tour guide was very funny, and had a ton of really good information. I saw a lot of the major sights in London, such as Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, The London Eye, Tower Bridge, London Bridge, The London Tower, Buckingham Palace (again), The Marble Arch and a million other things.

One of the things that was really interesting was how much daily, but famous, life goes on. The guide was constantly doing things like pointing out “There’s where Chris Martin and Gwenneth Paltrow live, in house 47, and there’s where Madonna lives” and so on. I saw the hotel where Jimmy Hendrix died, and where Michael Jackson stays in London and a ton of other interesting things. Very cool tour. It was “The Original Tour” if you are ever in the area and looking for one.

Towards the end of the tour you had the option to buy a GB 3 pass to eat a meal in one of three restaurants instead of paying the normal fare. They pointed out The Sherlock Holmes Pub where you could have fish and chips and I decided to hop off and check it out. It sounded like a complete tourist trap, but hell, I was hungry.

The pub was a tourist trap. It was full of Japanese tourists. Let me tell you about Japanese tourists. All the stereotypes are true. In every city I’ve been in they just crack me up. They don’t even seem to look at what they are seeing, they just want to take pictures of each other in front of it. They scamper around snapping pictures at like 20 per second.

Anway, I went up the bar and noticed immediately like 10 beer pumps. A beer pump is what you use to get beer out of a cask in the celler, instead of a tap and faucet that takes beer out of a keg driven by CO2. I love cask beer and immediately ordered some, and it was great. Warm, flat and full of taste. Very nice for my first beer in London. I asked the bartender if I could get my official fish and chips at the bar and he hooked me up. I chatted with him for quite a while about beer, and eventually asked if the pub was made purely for eating tourists money. He said they do get a lot of tourists because of the bus tour but that they have quite a few locals, especially during the week. I felt a little better about the whole thing.

I had one more pint and headed out. I wanted to go down to the river and see some things there so I headed that way. I crossed a footbridge over the Thames and decided to ride The London Eye.

A note on The Thames. It’s filthy. If you stand on the bridge and watch it flow past it is just full of trash. The trash just keeping coming and coming. I’ve got to think that The Thames is what Terry Pratchett modeled his description of The Ankh after.

Anyway, I went over to The Eye and rode that. Nice ride. Quiet, and nice view. The curved glass makes it hard to take good photos but I did get a really awesome surrealist photo of The Houses of Parliament which I am proud of.

After The Eye I went over to The Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Big Ben. I didn’t really feel up to touring them so I just snapped some pics and walked past heading towards Trafalgar Square.

Trafalgar Square is pretty interesting. Lots of people relaxing, making out, chasing pidgeons. The pidgeons are great. They are so used to people that you basically have to push them out of the way. I saw a kid actually pick one up off the ground and walk about with it for a minute. He’s probably dead of disease now. Aparently it’s okay to feed them, which is why there are so many, but if you feed them in the main part of the square you’ll get fined. They want to get rid of them and have aparently hired a guy with a hawk to chase them off now and then.

After that I had had enough sightseeing for the day and headed back to my room. I had intended to maybe go back out later that night and find a pub but I laid down for a bit and was out like a light. I slept until about 9am this morning and woke up feeling much refreshed. I checked out of Shithole Hostle and walked over to my new hotel. I couldn’t check in until 11:30am so I did a little more sightseeing while I waited… but that’s tomorrow’s story.

Pictures from London are up. There’s a few good ones in there. Honestly, I’m a bit sick of sightseeing, but I feel like I owe it to myself. I kind of want to just hang out until I go home.

My new hotel has absolutely no Internet access so I’ve finally been forced to use an Internet cafe. It’s pretty nice. I have a little cubby in the basement and they are playing a really good downtempo mix. Unfortunately it’s only open till 10pm so I’ll be logging off early the next two nights.

Talk to you tonight.

Oh, here’s the movie of the guards. It’s huge, but it’s pretty cool.

This entry isn’t finished yet, and I don’t know if I will. I let too much time pass between exporing Berlin and writing this and it just sounds boring. Berlin was a nice place, but not all that exciting.

As I’m walking around during my days I usually end up coming up wiht a first line for the day’s post. Something catchy. Something will draw the reader in and make them want to cuddle up to the post. I assure you that on Monday in Berlin I had a great one and you would be immediately enthralled. Unfortunately it’s Wednesday now and I’ve had like no sleep or food in three days so you are going to have to deal with this rather limp paragraph.

I woke up leisurely and cleaned up for my first day in Berlin. I didn’t really have a plan but the place seemed so inviting I wasn’t really worried about it. From the walk the night before I knew there was a Dunkin Donuts right down the street and I intended to raid it. I had a nice breakfast outside, and was feeling pretty good so I started walking. The only thing I really knew I wanted to do in Berlin was see the wall but I knew there was a lot more to do, so I finally decided to take an official tour.

Right outside the Dunkin Donuts there were tour busses lined up but they were all empty so I went and walked. There are a couple big train stations in Berlin. The Hbf (Hauptbahnhauf) which is the new, swanky central station that just opened, ZOO which the Zoological Gardens station and others which don’t much come into this story. Hbf is where I arrived the night before from Paris and ZOO was the closest station to where I was sleeping.

I walked over to ZOO to kick around a bit and saw a red tour bus parked on the corner that had some people in it. EU 20 later I had a seat on top and we started rolling.

The tour was really kind of boring, but we did circle pretty much the entire city and it gave me a chance to get my bearings. I saw some places I definitely wanted to go back to so once the tour ended I rode back to Hbf and started walking. The main things I wanted to see were the remains of the Berlin wall, the museum area, the book burning monument, which they said was supposed to light up at night and a really nice looking park on the west side.

Right across from the Hbf is the river and a nice river front park area. Walked past all that and heading west towards the residential section and the big park I had seen from the tour bus. The park is huge, and very nice. Right in the middle of the city. There were tons of people out sunbathing (usually nude) but not many people walking so I just walked and walked. It was a nice respite after the business of Paris and I stopped a few times just to chill out. Boring eh? It gets better.

The walk to the park, and then eventually back to my hotel was really pretty long, although not much happened. I was kind of beat and, of course, sweating my ass off so I went back to my hotel and showered and chilled out a bit. I kind of wanted to let the sun go down some more before heading east to the wall and other points. I’m telling you, I hate the sun.

Once I had cooled off a bit I decided to check out the subway. Thus far I had been riding only on the main trains in Berlin. There are a few different types of trains there. The Regional Express trains, which are fast but only stop at a few distant places and don’t very often, the S-Bahn which is the above ground “city” trains, and the U-Bahn which is the subway. I had mostly been using the S-Bahn but I love subways so I decided to head to east Berlin via the U-Bahn.

By the way, I don’t know if they take offense or not, but they don’t call it east and west Berlin anymore. Generally if they make the distinction they say “Former east Berlin”

I made my first stop the wall, and the monument area that is around it. They have put up a sort of park with information about what went on called the Topography of Terror. The remains of the wall itself are only 50 meters long. That’s all that’s left of it. That portion is surrounded by a fence that keeps you about 2 meters from the wall. People still want to take a piece home with them and if they didn’t protect it it would be completly gone instantly

The wall was interesting to see, because I remember when it came down and all the excitement associated with it, but it didn’t really mean a lot to me. I wasn’t there and it didn’t affect me, it’s just something I had heard and read about. That said, it’s still a somber place. I think more impressive than the remains of the wall is the line in the road that you can follow that shows where it used to be. In many places you can see a double brick line right through the middle of the road that is where the wall once stood. That goes further in representing the division of Berlin to me than seeing the wall itself.

I’ve arrived in London and all’s well. My flight ended up being an hour and a half delayed but aside from that it was pretty good. EasyJet is cheap, and weird, but they got me here so I applaud them.

Things weren’t so easy once I got into London. It was about 1am already when we landed and I had no idea how to get to where I needed to go. I bummed some directions off a guy working in a little airport store but he told me I was screwed because the subway (Tube, Underground) stops running at midnight.

I took the train from the Luton airport into London central and landed at King’s Cross station. I had no map or anything but the guy at the train station told me that I could get a bus to Paddington Station, which is where I needed to go. As I came out of the station there was a guy offering taxi service so I threw in the towel and went with him. Turned out to be a good choice. He got me right here and he was very cool. We chatted about traveling Europe and he told me he hated Paris, so we talked for a while about that. Seems like everyone hates Paris.

I landed at my hostel (Wake Up! London) and man it’s a shit hole. It had a bed though, so that’s all I needed. Now I am trying to figure out what to do with myself today. I need food, to do laundry and to get maps and information. And I need rest. My legs and feet are killing me Walking around Berlin all day Monday (report coming soon) and Dresden Tuesday (also wik) just did me in. I need to bust out a protractor and figure out how many miles I walked. I’m guessing it’s gotta be marathon level.

So that’s it for now. I’ve got to find some breakfast, and some information. The weather in London is stormy, cold, rainy, overcast and utterly perfect. I hope it stays like this till I leave. I never want to see the sun again. My arms, head and face are so tan… and the rest of me is pasty white. Weak.

I am utterly defeated. I hurt everywhere and I’m so tired I want to die.
I had a great day though, and Dresden was gorgeous.
I am at the airport waiting for my plane to London now and don’t really have the energy to type up yesterday or today’s posts, so hold on a bit! (I know you can barely stand the suspence)
Tonight I’ll be in London, with people who speak English, and supposedly a private room where I intend to get down to some serious, serious showering and doing nothing. I think I might end up taking tomorrow completely off. Maybe find a place that does foot massage. God my feet hurt.

Anyway, till then check out the pictures of Dresden. They’re awesome.

Today in Berlin was wonderful. I love this city. It’s perfect and I want to tell you all about it and all the great things I saw in detail but I’m not going to. I have to go to bed. I have a train to Dresden leaving at 5:12am tomorrow and it’s already 12:42am. That was the only train I could get that would get me back to Berlin in time to catch my flight to London.

Tomorrow is going to hurt.

Why do it? I saw everything I wanted to see in Berlin today. I walked the entire city. I don’t want to do it again. It’s nice here, but I don’t need another day as a tourist. I want to see Dresden very much. It comes highly recommended and hell, just sitting on an air conditioned train for 2 hours each way sounds like heaven right now.

I will relate a quick little story, or two.

I bought two beers and two waters on my way back to my room just now. I put them in a bag provided by the grocer. I opened one of the waters and it’s carbonated. I hate sparkling water. Whatever, I shook it till the gas was gone and sucked it down. So then I’m walking and my bag rips and one of my beers shatters on the ground. I swear to you, I almost cried.

I get back to the hotel and ask the receptionist (male) if I can get a wake up call. He responds with a string of German. “Sprect English?” I ask and he says no. So then we went through a highly humorous pantomime session resulting in me, hopefully, getting a wake up call at 4am. I had to tilt my head and pretend I was sleeping to get “wake up call” through and then remember my high school German to get the numbers right. I think it worked.

“Zitter… uh… nine!” “Fier… hours!”

I wish I had the video tape.

Talk to you all about Berlin tomorrow. Probably from London.

Oh, I did upload lots of pictures from Berlin. Check em out.

I feel like some part of me remembers Germany. Which is silly. The only thing German about me is my name but as soon as we got into Germany I fell in love. The land is beautiful. It’s just like the tiny towns I’ve seen in Pennsylvania that I always loved so much. It’s all green, rolling hills with little old towns tucked into valleys. Perhaps that why so many German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania.

Today was pretty boring. Basically a full day of travel. I took the high speed train Thalys from Paris to Cologne, Germany and then the high speed train ICE from Cologne to Berlin. The only thing exciting that happened all day was there was a huge fight in the station in Cologne. Can you guess what it was about? A woman! No, I kid, of course not. It was about the World Cup. I guess two rival idiots decided to have at it right in view of about 200 German police. By time the police broke it up some old lady had been KNOCKED down the stairs and several guys were standing around with torn shirts. I hope they get to spend the night in jail and miss the game.

Let me tell you something. There are a LOT of police around. I guess for this very reason. I’m assuming that it’s not like this all the time but there are just tons and tons of them.

Anyway, I left Paris at 10:55am and arrived in Berlin exactly on time, to the minute, at 8:48pm. There was an hour layover in Cologne so it was about 9 hours of train time all told. Still, it was nice. The trains are very fast, quiet and there’s plenty to look at. At one point the ICE train was doing 235 km/h which is almost 150 mph. Pretty sweet. The ICE shows it’s speed now and then on a display. The Thalys is kind of old school and doesn’t show shit.

Berlin so far is awesome. The station is brand new and it’s very nice. The tourism booth was still open so I managed to get lots of information, a train pass and a new hotel reservation. I had booked two nights in a hostel just to make sure I would have a place to stay but when I got here I found a really nice 3 star hotel for EU 45/night. Can’t beat that. The hostel was going to be EU 22/night and that was for a 8 bed dorm with shared bathroom. It’s really nice to have a place to hang up your clothes and know that they will still be there when you return after a day of sightseeing.

My hotel is about 600 meters from the Zoological Garden station (ZOO) which is the center of the shopping district. It’s really nice. My hotel is on a side road right off a road that looks every bit as nice as 47th through The Plaza.

The room itself is interesting. They seem to keep getting smaller. And I have a Murphey bed! How cool is that? Not very cool, I admit, but still. I’ve never actually seen one. Since I didn’t do anything cool today except ride the train I’ll try to upload some pictures of the room. My Internet access is pretty spotty. I’m “borrowing” it from someone. Who knows who.

So far everyone I have run into speaks very good English and they are very polite. Nice change from Paris. Signs are sometimes mixed, sometimes not, but once you get the basics it’s not too bad. The train system seems to be really nice. There’s a “snelltrain” that runs just between the major stations in the city, a above ground tram that hits most of the bigger stations and then an underground subway which I don’t know anything about yet.

Oh, the first thing I ate when I arrived in Germany was a giant soft pretzel. That kicked ass. Place selling them for EU 0.60 just as I got off the train.
I continue to eat everything I’m presented and I’m telling you, it hasn’t been easy. I got a toasted ham and cheese sandwich while on the train today and it was completely slimed in mayo. So nasty. I ate every bite.

I probably got off pretty lucky in Paris. I never did figure out how to successfully sit down at a table at a street cafe but if I had I think I may have been presented with a giant bucket full of slimy things in shells. That seemed to be the chow du jour.

So that’s probably about it for Sunday. I am going to clean up and then hit a bar or two out on the main street I think. I hear Germany has beer. I’d like to drink some. I also need to finish watching The Godfather. My battery pooped out like 20 minutes from the end. They had just blown up Mike’s hot, new Italian wife.

Oh, one last cool thing. Most of the places I’ve been in Europe have these really nice faucets on the showers. They are marked with temperatures and presumably the water that comes out is that temperature. They also lock at 38 celcius and you have to push a button to go hotter than that. Which is good. That’s too hot. Anyway, I like mine to be about 35.

Oh, there’s one more last thing. You know how in the US when you get a soda from a soda machine it drops like 20 stories into the bin at the bottom but somehow when you open it it doesn’t explode? That’s cause they keep the nice and cold. In Paris everything is warm. When you buy a soda (or in this morning’s case, an Orangina) and open it it blows a geyser a mile high and all over you. This happened to me over and over and I never learned.

‘Night!

Dear World Cup,

Fuck you. Stop making everything so expensive.

Love,
Jason

Paris: Friday; Retrospective

Friday morning I woke up sick as a dog. I had been feeling kind of shitty Thursday night but I thought it was just a headache from getting drunk in Brussels. Not so. I blew my nose and blood came out. Not really a good thing. I lazed around as long as I could before I had to check out of my hotel, finally took a shower and got moving. All I wanted to do was lay down.

I hit the tourist information booth in the train station to try to find a cheaper hotel or hostel. They gave me information on a place just down the street that was only EU 45/night so I booked it for two days. That’s where I am now. I’m finding that these tiny, cheap hotels may be old, and small but they take care of them. All of my rooms have been cleaner than I expected. Just as clean as a nice, big hotel. Just with less “stuff”.
I also got some maps, tour pamphlets and a 3 day pass for the transportation system.

Paris’ streets are insane. I have a very nice map the tourist information booth gave me but I get lost two or three times trying to find anything. I walked a good mile and a half getting to this hotel just to find out it was right around the corner. I’ve gotten really good at reading maps so it’s not that I am stupid. The roads just don’t line up!

Once I got checked into my hotel I rested for a bit and decided to set out for Paris. What I really wanted to do was lay down and sleep all day, but I didn’t want to let a cold or something lame like that ruin a day of my vacation. I went back to the station and stood there looking at the metro (subway) map for about 15 minutes before some nice guy took pity on me and asked me where I was trying to go. I told him “The Louvre” just to have something to say and he told me which trains to take. It was non-obvious but now that I have spent some time on the subway it’s pretty clear.

When I got off the subway at The Louvre it was the first time I had seen Paris, really. Words really don’t do it justice. You are utterly surrounded by majestic buildings that look like something out of a movie. Probably because they are. The architecture is stunning and coming out of the station for the first time is just amazing.

I didn’t really have my bearings very well so I started walking towards the thing that looked like it might be important enough to contain the Mona Lisa. I walked into a square formed by some large buildings and finally saw the pyramid of The Louvre. The giant glass pyramid seen in my pictures is the entrance to The Louvre. Having no better plan for the day I bought a ticket to the museum and headed in. I have to admit, I’m a little burned out on museums but there were a few pieces I thought I should probably check out 🙂

I’ll spare you all the details. The Louvre is incredibly large and every single room is like a work of art itself. There are masterpieces just laying around everywhere. I most wanted to see Venus de Milo and of course The Mona Lisa. I did, and they were both beautiful. I wish they could have come up with a way to let people get closer to The Mona Lisa though. You are separated by a good 10 feet and you can’t really get a good look at the detail. I understand, of course, but still, maybe they could just use a few more layers of bullet proof glass and let me get closer.

I’m sure a true art aficionado could spend his entire life on just a single floor of The Louvre but I say if you’ve seen one ancient, classic Italian masterpiece you’ve seen them all. I blew through the whole place in about 2 hours.

I wanted to see The Arch de Triumph (I know I’m spelling it wrong, and I don’t care) and it didn’t seem to be too far by the map so I started walking. The area between The Louvre and the Place de la Concorde is all gardens and fountains. It’s very beautiful but the main walkway is all just sand. Poor choice. It was blowing around and being miserable. I walked and walked and walked and eventually made it to… the sorbet stand! What a relief. I had lemon and raspberry, if you were wondering.

After the garden section comes the main “strip” in Paris. The Avenue Des Champs Elysees. This is a huge road with all the major Parisian shops along it that just goes on forever. It ends at the arch. I’d say it took me a solid hour or more to walk from The Louvre to the arch. Once there I wandered a bit, and took it in. All of the major 12 streets of Paris meet at the arch so you get a great view of what’s going on. You can climb to the top of it and see all of Paris but I thought I’d like to save that for night time so I skipped it.

Once I had had enough of that I figured I might as well try to go to the Eiffel Tower to top off the day. I consulted my trusty map and made a plan. I would get lost! And then go back and forth on the same train several times! My plan worked out perfectly but I did eventually make it to the tower.

The tower is about a half mile walk (563 centiliters) from the nearest subway station so I headed towards it. Not exactly hard to find. It kind of sticks out. Once I got there I located the statue of Eiffel cause I wanted to sing to him. There was quite a crowd around so I kind of sung under my breath but I still think he appreciated it. I then got in what seemed to be a Disneyland style line for the tram to the top of the tower.

I waited in line for about 1.5 hours just to find out you couldn’t buy tickets to the top. Too crowded. You could only go to the second floor and then if you wanted to continue to the top you could buy another ticket there and head up. So I did that and stood in line for another hour but finally I made it to the top and it was worth it. You can see from the pictures. I had no idea Paris was so large and you can of course see every bit of it from the top of the tower. It’s just amazing, and it’s so white. It’s like the entire city is built of marble, and probably a good portion of it is. Very pretty.

I was feeling absolutely miserable by now so I headed back to my room as fast as I could. It’s three different trains from the Eiffel Tower and about an hour altogether. By time I got back I just wanted to die and that’s when I wrote the earlier post you may have seen. I laid down just planning to sleep for a few hours and feel better but didn’t wake up until almost midnight. I was still feeling terrible and just decided to call it a night and stay in.

My first impressions of Paris are that it’s too big to understand. You could easily spend your life here and never find all of it. I feel like I know most of Kansas City after 10 years but there are still places I wouldn’t be able to find on a map if you mentioned them. In Paris I feel like that about even the tiny neighborhood I am staying in.
The language barrier is also much worse. No signs are in English and a lot of people either don’t speak it or pretend they don’t. I’m doing a lot of pointing and hand waving 🙂