Paris

(Avec Marie-Anne et Etienne)
Our last stop was Paris with my aunt and uncle, Marie-Anne and Etienne.

We arrived to the city around noon and took the metro to her house. We met her as she was biking up to the entrance of her building (she had stepped out to buy bread). Marie-Anne greeted us with cheerful hugs. The hugs threw Sam and I off; we had gotten into the rhythm of leaning in and kissing the cheeks.

Tired and in need of a nap, we ambled into her flat and met Etienne. Marie-Anne insisted we eat lunch, but I was so exhausted the thought of lunch made me nearly want to cry. I mean, why eat when sleeping sounds like a precious Godsend? But the American Southerner within me put the need for sleep to the side and politely agreed that a lunch would indeed be wonderful.

Etienne was preparing steaks. Steaks! I love steaks. I was asked how did I like me steaks? Why, rare and bloody, of course and thank you.

When the steaks arrived, all I could eat was one bite. At that point I could not take it anymore. I was so tired, my stomach was in a knot and jumping. I would not be able to eat my beloved friend, the Rare and Bloody Steak. Ah well. I excused myself and went unconscious on the first thing I could collapse on.

Marie-Anne and Etienne speak English extremely well, so I did not feel guilty in the slightest leaving Sam to eat lunch with them. I think all they spoke of were sights that he must see while in Paris, one of which was the Eiffel Tower. Sam and I had already discussed previously that we did not care very much to see the Tower, or climb atop that Tower and see all of Paris (especially to pay for that climb!), but I am very certain that Sam listened anyway.

Marie-Anne is madly in love with her city, and so of course she was rightly excited that we were there--especially me, my first journey out of the country without any parental guidance! Woohoo!
When I awoke, Sam laid out a map of Paris and told me of all the places we were suggested to see. Then he showed me the places we had talked about wanting to see before starting our journey out into the big-wide world.

We like gardens and plants and things and not a far walk away from us there was the Jardins des Plantes (the Gardens of Plants). The garden was very important to the botany school and has a wide variety of plants covering three hectares of land. So off we went to the gardens.

We got lost. It is natural. Eventually we made it, even though we took a haphazard way of getting there. We weren't too worried. We knew where we were now, so we could get back without issue.

At the entrance of the garden, there was a statue of an elephant (I think... I can't remember) and a stegosaurus hiding in the bush. I liked the stego more and pushed the memory of whatever-the-other-guy-was out of my brain.

The garden rocked. It was super hot in Paris during our stay, about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, so Sam and I stuck to the shade as much as possible. We found some cool frogs hanging out in the poinds in the area and bunch of crows.

When we were good and tired, we started going home. Well, we got lost again. The road names were constantly changing and didn't make any sense to our brains. On top of that, it was the day of the Gay Pride Parade in Paris, and so there were people everywhere.

Some streets were blocked, and you'd think that would make things easier, not having to fight through the crazy traffic. But no. No, we stayed lost.

Needless to say, by the time we got home we were about to pass out and it was dinnertime. Also, dinnertime in France is closer to 8 o'clock than 6 o'clock, which I believe is standard American dinnertime. We ate, set up our bed for the evening, and then died.

The next day, we were determined to not get lost. The plan was to amble about in the direction of Notre Dame, then find the Luxembourg Gardens.  Amble we did, and when we felt a little lost, all we had to do was look up. The cathedral was there, just a block or two away.

We passed some street vendors on our amble and were delighted by their inexpensive prices and their funtastic wares. We had a three posters for five Euros deal and got a couple of Parisen pin-ups and a cartoon of Josephine Baker.

We stopped at the Seine River and sat on a bench for a break, people watching and doodling the Notre Dame cathedral from where we sat. Well, I drew the Notre-Dame cathedral and Sam people-watched.  When we felt well-rested, we got up and continued our walk towards the big ole church.

We were discussing how pretty the building's architect was when we suddenly stopped and stared at the longest line of people I'd ever seen outside of the airport. It snaked across the entire courtyard in front of the great cathedral. Sam and I walked the line in awe but did not join. There was no way in hell I was going to wait in a line that long to go inside of Notre Dame. I was perfectly capable of enjoying its outside splendor without having to be suffocated so I could see the inside.

This brought up the fun topic of conversation: what makes a national monument? Who says this is the thing that is better than everything else, when there are clearly just as beautiful things in other places?

Ahhhh, philosophizing. A great way to waste time.

So what happened after that? We mosied-on over to the Luxembourg Gardens. When we got there, we realized we were famished. We discussed going out, buying bread and cheese, and bringing it back to the Gardens. We walked until we found a boulangerie (a bakery store). We bought some bread and a beautiful slice of flan as dessert. Then we went in search for some sort of store that had cheese. We realized that we had no knife on our persons, so how would we cut cheese if we were to buy a huge chunk of it? We looked for something that could fix our problems, because France doesn't have American Singles, and we found a small little package that had individually wrapped cheese cubes.



I commented that I remembered the cheese specifically from our visit with Denis and Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie fed these to her cats as a treat. Sam said that it was probably them just feeding their cats with real cheese and it wasn't cat-cheese at all.

We discovered it was cream cheese in cube format, and yes you could certainly feed it to your cats if you wanted. And why not? I spend a bazillion dollars on my ferrets every year.

So we ate at the Luxembourg Gardens and it was awesome. We were originally going to sit in the grass, but a police-dude came by and shooed everyone off the grass. When he went away, everyone went back on the grass to continue with whatever they were doing before, but we decided to find an official sitting site.

We did, and we ate in front of a big fountain that I forgot to take a picture of. I fed the ducks in the fountain with bits of bread, to which they responded to by swarming towards me.

Afterwards we walked around. Someone had left the ends of a baguette in the park, so we fed those bits to the pigeons and sparrows and whatever else swarmed at us for the free meal.

We were done adventuring after that and made our way home, just in time for a nap before dinner.

The next day we went to the Army Museum, which had examples or arms and armaments dating all the way from the Bronze Age and some examples of Neolithic "weaponry."

It was pretty awesome. Seeing people's creative brains working to create the optimal weapon--whether it be for hunting, dueling, warring, or just showing off--was really incredible. Some folks throughout history came up with some crazy stuff.

I was very partial to the odd types of guns we saw. The above picture is one essentially of a grenade launcher, but not really a grenade launcher. I don't know if that makes sense. But we're talking about olden times here, and this being a product of it. Which, in my opinion, is incredibly impressive.

(By the way, the image looks weird because I had to take the picture in two parts to get the whole thing. It's not that it was huge, it's just that it was 10x more difficult to photograph anything in detail with the point-and-click camera, especially behind glass. Which was everything.)

I really liked this guy. I mean, holy shit, it's a freakin' gun-axe. How awesome is that? We also saw gun-swords, which were a whole different kind of awesome. We learned about the evolution from the matchlock to the flintlock and all those fun things in between. I also saw some neat guns that were all Steampunkery goodness. I wanted to take them home and play pretend with them.

It wasn't all just guns, or course, but we were in the Arms and Armament section of the Army museum.

Eventually we moved on to learn about the different French empires (there was of course a huge section on Napolean), and then moved on from there to learn about both World Wars from France's perspective.

I was disappointed there wasn't information on the French Foreign Legion anywhere. They had information on the Free French and the French underground (this was during Germany's occupation in France during WWII), which was really interesting.

I guess I was just hoping to see something of my grandfather somewhere. I don't know why I thought the French Foreign Legion would be in the Army museum.




All over the Army museum, there were cannons and things. So I made Sam pose with a lot of cannons and things so I could take pictures of him. It was quite fun and turned into a game in my head. I don't know if Sam thought it was a game or not, but it sure was a helluva fun thing.



This was outside of the World Wars section in the museum. If you look really close, Sam is kinda-sorta-definitely laughing inside.

And there was OF COURSE a big ass tank. What would an army museum even BE without a big ass tank?


Sam could tell you what kind it is. I'm sorry, I just don't know.





We saw A LOT of girls doing sexy pin-up poses with the cannons.  I couldn't tell if it was something everyone did or if it was Nationality specific (outside the World Wars section there were so many frickin' Americans it was almost like we weren't in France anymore).

This is Sam's sexy pin-up pose with a  cannon. You can tell he's being sexy because, you know, he's there. So duh.


And you can tell I was being artsy with the point-and-click because I'm using a model and a long cannon.

Yeppers. We are officially artistic professionals.






And this is the other sexy photo of Sam with a cannon.

We saw a kid ask her mom to take a picture of her sticking her head in the barrel of the cannon, but her head didn't fit. So she just rested it on the lips and smiled for her photo shoot.

It was a good idea though.


We went home thinking that the next day was the day of our plane flight home, but quickly found out that we still had an extra day in Paris.

We didn't know what to do. We were very tired and were not up to another day of sight-seeing. So instead of sight-seeing, we went into one of the shopping quarters and perused the thrift stores (a friperie) and a junk shop. We found some neat stuff and Sam bought me some awesome clothes that would make good bellydance cover-ups.

We got back home, pleased with our finds, and began to pack up. My cousins, Adrienne and Chloe, wanted to go out on a walk with their friends and asked if we wanted to join. Sam was tired, but I agreed to go out with them.

We stepped outside and out of nowhere, the sky opened up and poured down cold rain upon our heads. Everyone rushed for cover under the nearest cafe. Just as quickly as it had started, the rain stopped. We walked out to a garden that had some fountains. It was so hot that everyone was playing in the fountains. I asked Chloe if it was sanitary to play in the fountain like that? She said no, not anymore, because people were in it.

I was thinking more around the terms of how many people pee in the fountain, but whatever. Adrienne and her friends stuck their feet in the fountain and I found a public drinking station to dunk my head under (it was a faucet).

We went home. The girls left to go and fulfill their social obligations and Sam and I hung out for a wee bit, just chillaxing. Dinnertime came around, we ate, and then Sam and I decided to go out on the town for our last evening stroll in Paris.

Well, it rained.

But we said, fuck it! We're going out anyway. We found a tiny piece of green next to the Seine to get rained on and watched the lightening storm.  We didn't have a very good view of the lightening storm, but it was okay. The sky was pink and encircling Notre Dame at our viewpoint.

Eventually it got too cold and I had forgotten my jacket anyway, so we walked back home in the not-quite-pouring rain, both tired and ready to go home but definitely not unhappy.