Beauty (Versailles Gardens at Night) and the Beast (Catacombs of Paris)

one of the main fountains

path of dancing fire

fountains with laser and smoke

pathway from one fountain to the next

kids running through the smoke

water fountain with lights

Versailles, one small garden of many

stacks of thigh bones

stacks of "old" bones

tunnel to catacombs

Saturday July 31^st : report by Steve

After days of looking at “old things”, buildings, statues, paintings, stained glass windows, etc, it was my turn to pick something “old” to go look at. It’s now a family joke to say, “ Do you know how old that is?” because Terri is always comparing to what we have or don’t have in the USA, to give the girls perspective of what they are looking at. Anything over a hundred years of age is old in our area and a couple hundred years for most of the US and we have looked at some building structures from 60 AD and most of the stuff is at least 300 - 400 years old. I decided to put a male spin on things. We went to the catacombs!

The catacombs started out as quarries for limestone and gypsum. In 1786 the unsanitary city cemetery had become a problem so they began the monumental project of removing and transporting millions of skulls, bones and rotting corpses to the quarries. It took 15 months to complete the project, which was done at night, so as to not upset the “living” folk.

Just before the Revolution, Charles X threw parties in the catacombs (could have been a great Halloween bash!), and during World War II the French Resistance set up headquarters there.

We spent just over an hour waiting in line, just like Rick Steve’s guide told us and we began our descent down the narrow stairway into the underground. After maneuvering as many stairs as we did ascending Notre Dame, we were several floors below the busy crowds above and headed down long tunnels to the bones. If you are over 6 foot tall be sure to duck you head at the appropriate times and all should be aware of the goo dripping from the ceiling and the slick stone floors. The bones are stacked in very neat, organized and even artistic patterns. Outlines of churches, crosses and designs can be seen with the various arrangements of skulls and thighbones!

We spent over an hour following the trails between the stacks of bones and Terri translated some of the various quotes about death etched in marble. Almost like headstones, but not a tribute to any one person, because no one knows whose skull is who’s.

Upon finishing the tour, we returned to the girls favorite activity, shopping. After a while of that, we had a little competition to see who could get back to the apartment first, Terri on the bus, or the girls and I on the metro. We won by 20 minutes, but found out that it wasn’t really a competition after all, because Terri stopped to do some more shopping on the way home.

We took a break, and rested up for our evening Versailles garden and fountain tour.

Jumped on the metro, then the train to Versailles. Had dinner at an outdoor table, typical French postcard setting, then headed on over to the palace. The weather was just right for a 3-hour stroll around the gardens. It was amazing to see how big, beautiful and detailed the gardens are. The grounds of Versailles cover over 4,000 acres and the gardens are likely 200 acres or so. A new fountain is discovered with almost every turn and many have been updated with sound, light, laser, smoke, and fire to add to the effect. The evening finished with a 30 minute or so fireworks show set to classical music, then it was off to the races to beat the other tourists to the train so that we had a seat for the return trip. Got to bed at 2:00 am, but had a great day in spite of the blisters.

Pain et Beurre Chaque Jour

Sunday, Aug. 1, 2010

Instead of regaling you with more of the wonderful things we have been seeing and doing, I thought I’d write a bit about the REAL reason I have come to Paris… food!

Now, if you know me, you know that I would not really be classified as a “foodie” because I am pretty much willing to eat anything – high brow, low brow, peanut butter or filet mignon – and can enjoy them all equally well. You may also know that I do not especially like to cook. I do cook for my family and try to provide a balanced diet and lovingly cooked meals, but that is because I love my family and not because I like to cook. Well, here in Paris there is always someone, somewhere cooking something lovely and delicious if you are willing to pay the money for it. We have found lots of lovely things and have some pictures to prove it. We have also done cooking on our own because we are not always willing to pay for someone else to do the work. In fact, we even brought a suitcase full of cereal, some tuna (Morgan sacrificed for the greater good here because one of the cans of tuna leaked a bit of tuna juice in her suitcase - interesting perfume!) and even (quelle horreure!) ramen noodles. We have not eaten the ramen but do eat our cereal with lait en boite for breakfast. Here is some info about our food adventures…

Grocery shopping – there are lots of little grocery stores sprinkled through every neighborhood. They are usually a Monop’, G20, Carrefour (big sponsor of the Tour de France) or a larger Monoprix. We do a lot of our basic shopping there – like nutella (yes, that is a staple for us!), milk (the milk comes in boxes and is not refrigerated until you open it because it has gone through an ultra-high temperature pasteurization process). I really like the taste of the milk but not everyone does. The fruit and vegetables at the small stores are more expensive than you can find in a street market. There is a street market just around the corner from us on Tuesdays and Fridays. We bought fresh lettuce, tomatoes, apples, bananas, melons and peppers at a much lower price than in the little stores. There is also cheese, fish, some cooked foods (Arabic food at our market), specialty sauces and olives, flowers, clothes and jewelry. It was so much fun to buy our produce there. When it comes to cooking, the difficulty for me has been finding and buying meat. It is difficult to buy at the market because it is all packaged and cut differently than I am used to seeing, and there was no beef – only chicken and fish. I have not found a local boucherie yet and would be a bit intimidated to ask for something. The meat in the small stores is very expensive and comes in small packages. We have purchased some hamburger and some chicken breasts, but we’ll have to see what else we can find. The oven in the apartment is also a microwave/conventional oven unit so I am not sure I could even cook a roast in it if I found one and was willing to pay for it. When we got out to eat, we usually try to find something with a larger serving of protein because that is a bit lacking in our diet (don’t worry – certainly NO danger of starving to death!) We found out last night however that it is truly true that the French like their meat much more rare than we do! Even Heather’s hamburger steak was red in the middle after asking for it to be medium.

Meat may be a bit tougher for me to come by, but the bread, oh the bread, AND the butter. I told many of you that we were going to eat baguettes and butter everyday while here and so far so good! We have found several different boulangeries (bread stores) to buy baguettes, croissants, pain au chocolat, etc., etc. The best baguette so far was one I bought at the market. The butter is wonderful – such a fresh, sweet and light taste. Yummmm. When we are out seeing museums, etc. we also have the chance to buy things for a picnic lunch or find a crepe, sandwich or gyro to eat (lots of Greek places here). We are still on the hunt for a good place to eat boeuf bourgyogne (sp?) for Morgan – that is one of her goals while here because she spent a whole Saturday making that dish once. It’s good to have a goal isn’t it? We also carry a lot of water with us because a can of pop is usually 1.50 euros (about 2 dollars) and when you times that by five people, water tastes very good.

I am sure there will be more info on food throughout the blogs, but just know that I am being good to my word and eating some “baguette et beurre chaque jour.”

Au revoir,

Terri

Museum Madness

It’s Kara and I’m talking about yesterday, July 28^th. It was a day on the go because on July 27^th Mom and Dad got a two-day museum pass. To make the cost of the museum pass worth while you had to see at least two museums each day. Simply put, today was the last day to cram as much sight-seeing and very-old-object-examining in as possible. The reason that Mom and Dad each got a pass and us kids didn’t was not because we didn’t want to see the museums or because they were tired of us but because kids under 18 are free in most museums. It’s nice knowing that we aren’t costing money and it’s also nice to be a kid again even if it’s only a technical title.

We got up, got ready, and headed out the door at a pretty good time of morning in order to accomplish as much as possible in our tourists’ quest. A ride on the metro and some walking got us to our first stop of the day: The Orangerie museum. This museum was actually built for the Water Lilies collection by Monet, his last great work of art. Once in we went straight to the first room covered in giant stretches of oil paint ponds. They are truly amazing! There are two oval rooms with four walls (separated by doors). Each wall is fitted with a huge painting. They are six feet tall and so long they’re hard to fit in a picture. They are painted with bright colors and are very interesting to study close as well as enjoy from farther away. Our Rick Steve’s book provided us with lots of extra info that gave some background and better understanding of the thought process behind each of them, which made the paintings all together more fun to see. I wasn’t aware that the museum had a whole collection of art other than the Water Lilies as well, which we then proceeded to view.

Next was the Cluny museum. Thankfully it is a museum displaying objects other than paintings or we may have been losing interest after the art museums of the day before plus the Orangerie. This museum and its contents have medieval and ancient history behind them. It is made up of three buildings, one being a home, another a chapel and the last being ancient Roman thermal baths! The audio guides were only one Euro, so we each rented one. They took Mom’s ID as a ransom to make sure we returned all of the guides at the end of our tour. We got to see some pretty interesting things. Old church benches and the decapitated stone heads of the Kings of Judah. I was excited to see these because I’d heard a lot about them when we went to Notre Dame. If no one has wrote this on the blog before me, the heads were originally on bodies of biblical kings. You can still see these bodies right on the front of Notre Dame, but they have (relatively) new heads these days because the Kings of Judah were also taken to represent the French Kings and during the Revolution while the people were hacking off the heads of their real flesh-and-blood monarchs, they decided to go for the statues too. The heads were buried and only recently discovered in someone’s garden. (I can hardly imagine the heart-stopping shock going out to dig a hole for some tomatoes and finding a huge stone head staring back at you!) We saw the Roman bathes as well. Dad keeps making fun of Mom for going crazy over really old things like this, but it’s easy to see why. The day before we got to see some old Roman ruins under ground. I couldn’t get over the little doorways and steps. Someone actually walked there. Someone that lived in a completely different world, yet walked in the very spot that you stand. And here we saw a whole room intact. We even saw one of the baths in pearly-white condition.

We wandered through the building sopping up the insightful information pouring out of our headphones. I had a piece of paper that held a chart of what numbers to enter into our audio guides and we had successfully made it through numbers 1 through 14 on the front page. Heather and I thought we were doing pretty good until I realized the paper folded out to reveal numbers 15-52. I just stared stunned for a minute. How in the world were we going to get all of these done? Heather on the other hand was not as quiet about it. This was not going to work for her. Me neither! We decided it was time for some skipping. We walked thought the museum looking at everything but only listening to the interesting-looking ones. A whole rooms was closed temporarily which also helped cut some time. One of the rooms we had to stop at though, was the unicorn tapestries. These are very famous, in case you didn’t know. They’re very large. Six of them portraying a girl, the same princess, going through the five senses. Taste, sounds, sight, touch, and smell. A whole tapestry for each. They’re very detailed, very old, and quite impressive. The thing is, there are six tapestries and five senses. No one knows for certain what the sixth tapestry represents. It shows the girl placing a necklace in a chest. Knowledge, heart, and even a sixth sense plus a couple more options have been presented as interpretations of the scene. Perhaps mystery is part of the fun and part of the fame. (Where would the Mona Lisa be without her mysterious smile?) And perhaps it’s an even stronger tie with the people of the past. Even if the days of real horse-powered transportation and manual labor seem simpler, the people thought just as deeply. Who knows what the thought process was? Maybe it is one of our interpretations, maybe it’s something completely different, or maybe they just wanted to keep us guessing!

We eventually did finish up the Cluny museum and we were hungry for lunch! We had packed a picnic lunch of sandwiches, cookies, and apples. Now we just had to figure out where we were going to eat the food which started to look better and better as time went on and the clock fell farther and farther away from normal lunch time. After Mom studied the map for some time we set ourselves in the direction of the Luxembourg Gardens and started walking. It really wasn’t too far a walk, happily proving wrong Mom’s warning that it would be a long distance. The park was beautiful and REALLY big. There was grass and trees and paths (And plenty of pigeons.) We ate on a bench (Glorious food! Yum Yum Yum!) then continued to explore the park. It had everything! A nice large fountain, tennis courts, lovely flowers, bathrooms (for 40 cents) and even a wading pool! We pulled up some chairs under a tree by the fountain. Miniature boats sailing in the water of the expansive fountain caught our eye. Kids ran around the fountain with big sticks. You give the boat a good push with the stick, it sails in the wind and you wait until it reaches another side so you can catch it and push it again. Heather was the most interested and went right up to the rental place to find out about prices. It was only two Euros to rent a boat for half an hour, about $2.60 in our money. It was a good price but we figured that we better leave now if we were going to climb the towers of Notre Dame (our next plan). Mom wanted to rest any way so she gave us a couple Euros and we got a boat for half an hour! They’re very small for boats of course, but they’re large enough to be a good weight. We hoisted the boat up and after several pictures with our sail boat, placed it in the water. Heather got to push it first and it sailed majestically through the fountain and promptly crashed into a small house near the middle built for the ducks. Thankfully those things do not tip over! It freed itself and we chased it across the fountain. We took turns pushing it and had a fun fairly non-thinking half an hour. You really only have to worry about which way the boat was going and we actually got to run around. We’ve been doing a ton of walking but not much running just for fun. It was also AWESOME because it was sunny! It was the first day it’s been fully shining sun since we got to Paris! This was also the first bit of lounging we’ve done in Paris. Really we’ve just been trudging around the side walks. Seeing awesomely cool things, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not quite as glamorous as the word “Paris” leads one to believe. This park felt like the glamour. Finally! =)

An hour after turning our boat in (we stayed there for much longer than planned) we walked out of the park. We turned our mind and our feet toward Notre Dame. Mom and Dad have gone up the towers before and weren’t going to do it again but Morgan, Heather, and I planned to arm ourselves with cameras and a bottle of water and climb each step of the nearly 400 stairs to the top. This climb cost money but it was covered by the museum pass plus us kids would probably be free anyway. We arrived at the side door where you have to enter the tower and we were met with disappointment. The tower closes at 6:30 but they let the last person go up at 6:00. It was now 6:20. Maybe we lounged in the park too long. At least we have time on our side. There’s always another day.

If we couldn’t climb Notre Dame today we just had to climb something else with a lot of stairs, so we continued in a different direction to the Arc de Triomphe. It was pretty impressive as well. It’s a very tall building but our first thoughts were turned not to the building itself (though we did take advantage of the photo op) but actually getting to the grand structure. Between us and it stretched a round-a-bout that we guessed was nearly eight lanes wide. It gets better. I say we guessed it was about eight lanes because there were no paint lines or any form of lanes at all! Cars drove as they please weaving through the traffic. All kinds of vehicles whizzed by and more rushed in from several entrances around the circle. We weren’t allowed to cross the street and of course there were no cross walks. We had to cross underground. After wandering around for a bit trying to figure out exactly how to go about this we found the entrance to the underground passage right to the Arc. We went down and got our tickets. The museum passes covered Mom and Dad but we had to wait in line for our free tickets. While waiting in line we over heard a conversation that I thought was quite funny. There were two 17 year old boys. They’re under 18 so they’re still free but kids aren’t allowed to go up without an adult, which they weren’t aware of. (I wouldn’t think about something like that either.) One of the boys talked a guy into getting their tickets for them to make it look like they were going up with him. It was pretty funny and their plan worked even thought the ticket lady knew they weren’t actually with their new “dad” since she had talked to them before. We got our tickets without a hitch and started up the stairs. It actually wasn’t a straight shot to the top. You would go up a few flights of stairs and then there was a floor of history and details about the Arc. We looked around at that and then continued up. We were at the top before we knew it. We all agreed it wasn’t half bad, and it has more than half the steps of Notre Dame, so Notre Dame shouldn’t be too bad! (Morgan has figured that going up and down Notre Dame will be like climbing from the basement to the fourth floor of Stadium High School four times. Oh fun.)

The top of the Arc was a lot of fun. We took pictures of the awesome view. You could see everything! We also took a lot of pictures of ourselves. We hung around up there for a while then went all the way back down to see the burning flame of the Unknown Soldier monument. It was nice.

Our day ended with going out to dinner. Our food was OK overall. Heather loved hers, though! She got a giant POT of mussels with cream sauce! Everyone but me tried one and said they were pretty good. They tried to get me to eat one but I am just not a seafood person and I don’t see that changing anywhere in the near (or distant) future. After dinner we retired to our little apartment, which is becoming more and more of our home though we miss our family, friends, and dogs back in Washington.

Sorry for the SUPER long blog but if you expected short from me you are sorely mistaken. Me writing long things is just how it works, you should know that about me so if you didn’t before now you do. =) Overall I’m having a great time in Paris. Like I said before, it’s not really glamorous (this day was definitely the most fancy we’ve had) but it’s interesting. There’s so much history and so much to see. We’ve seen places where famous kings, artists, and even ancient people have lived and worked. It’s such a great way to get close to and involved in history. I am just so glad we don’t have to literally walk in their shoes because even with modern-day footwear my feet are killing me! We absolutely love to get comments, so even if you just skim over the blog or look at the pictures, it would be awesome if you could drop a hello. I have just been informed that you can’t comment if you don’t have a blog account, so if you’re in the non-blog owners group (I don’t blame you) you could send your hellos and comments to our Mom’s e-mail at TPhipps909@aol.com and she’ll read them out loud. We will make her. =) Alright, well that’s all from me. Thanks for reading and have a great day.

Au Revoir,

Kara

A Pocketful of Pictures

The view from our apartment

Hmmm... no wonder this picture wasn't on the apartment ad. Kara has very accurately dubbed this the "Cow Closet."

Can you say YUM?

Versailles bike tour

Our first French crepe!

In our extremely fashionable rain ponchos at Versailles.

The famous Hall of Mirrors

Marie Antoinette's bedroom. She had the wall tapestries changed with every season and this is the summer tapestry.

Gardens at Versailles

Our Metro stop

Sacre Coeur

The beautiful Montmartre neighborhood

Moulin Rouge

Notre Dame

One of the rose windows

Nutella is pretty much the best food ever and there is no lack of it here in Paris! :)

We waited here for almost three hours in order to see the Tour riders.

Here they come! The riders whizzed by eight times.

The Eiffel Tower!

Notre Dame

The Seine in the evening

Very impressive stained glass in Sainte Chapelle

Sainte Chapelle

One of the six Lady and the Unicorn tapestries

The Luxembourg Garden

Our little boat

Sunset from our apartment window

I think we ate too many baguettes.

Kara is obviously suffering from the same problem ;)

This is the same gargoyle we have at home! Dad brought our model back from Paris several years ago.

Our best gargoyle faces

The view from the top of Notre Dame

Everywhere you look in Paris there is something beautiful to see!

Bonjour! Morgan here, and I have been given the assignment of posting some of the pictures I've taken thus far. Let me just say, Paris is awesome! I am so glad that we're here for four weeks because there is so much to do, see, and experience. I'm sure I will be doing a post soon but in the meantime enjoy the photos!